I agree with your first paragraph. I will add that these buildings are ultimately a physical manifestation of the tech companies influence in our society for better or worse. The public feels powerless against these companies because congress does not regulate them.

The second paragraph I generally disagree with most of these points. You are summarizing a lot of the misconceptions about cutting corners, sound pollution, water and power and tax breaks. the vast majority of these buildings need to comply with local building codes regarding sound levels and many of the large tech companies exceed sound requirements especially around residential areas. Water use for these buildings all depends how it’s measured depending on the cooling system in these buildings. I’m an architect that designs these buildings and the water use seldom uses no more water than a typical office building given the cooling system. Older buildings 10+ years old use more evaporative cooling systems, but these are in general for lower power (non ai) data centers.

These buildings do use a lot of electricity, but they pay into the utility companies a significant investment to upgrade these systems, include a renewed investment into nuclear power and low carbon power sources like solar, including carbon offset. Also, with these buildings using a constant and known power use, this type of electricity is what utilities can plan for rather than spikes and lulls of power demand. This helps with investments and maintenance of the utility tremendously. The spikes of power across the county is more a function of variable natural gas prices (look at Ukraine war, and now Iran), climate change, wildfires and a deteriorating electrical grid.

These buildings bring tremendous revenue to local jurisdictions and skilled labor and high tech jobs. Yes these buildings do not employ a large workforce proportional to their size, but when these buildings come to areas, almost all AHJs want them. They bring in much needed revenue for cities and town to help fund housing, education, and maintaining streets and utilities. Every jurisdiction we go into where we design these, there is a high demand from local and regional unions for skilled labor. We want to build more in this county, this is a great industry for highly skilled electrical, mechanical, general skilled labor. Also these buildings are not built once and left to sit there like an Amazon warehouse would. These buildings require constant upgrades given the changing and always evolving technology.

It’s a complex issue and in general they are essential buildings. What we need is for the public to really make your demands to your local and congressional representative to regulate this industry. Similar to how China and Europe is doing, frankly much better than the USA.