To give a rundown of the zombie facts haunting the data center debate: -They pollute water: Every instance we've seen so far was caused by something relating to construction, mostly the same as other large buildings. -They raise electricity prices as much as 267%: this was a stat about wholesale prices at specific nodes very close to data centers, not household prices in the area, which are often very different. There's no reliable pattern right now between DCs getting built and electric bills going up, but that could change in the future. -Their normal operation harms people's access to water: No clear case I can find, outside a weird case in Georgia where a DC accelerated the need for a larger water treatment plant which got passed onto consumers as higher bills. -They take all the land: even in Loudoun County with the most data center capacity anywhere DCs take up about 3% of the land. By 2030 all US data center buildings would cover about the surface area of Disney World -They create harmful infrasounds: this was based on a single video that lied about almost every study it flashed on the screen. We don't have any reason to think data center infrasound is harmful unless it's so loud you can physically feel it. -They don't pay taxes: this is the result of a game of telephone that started because data centers don't pay a specific type of tax (M&E sales) in most states, which got reported on a lot as "residents missing out on this much in tax revenue" which people mistook to mean DCs basically pay no taxes or get funded to get built. In reality that's just one of several taxes places can apply and in basically everywhere they're built DCs pay a lot of taxes. Loudoun collects $1.3 billion per year from them and doesn't charge M&E sales tax. -They reliably make annoying sound: there are clear cases where they've created awful noise pollution, but these mostly seem like outliers, though there are enough to be concerned. -They create harmful heat islands: The only study that's measured this finds that data centers can heat the air very close to them by a few degrees, and this drops to zero just a little farther out. A separate study that found that they heat the land for miles around seemed to have accidentally measured the results of normal land use change like new paved roads, and didn't control for that. It could be that the very largest ones create a harmful effect in areas where heat doesn't dissipate well, like desert valleys. I'm finding that most educated adults I meet believe almost all of these.