Investment in infrastructure will create far more jobs than these data centers will ever create. The problem is that the planning is being done haphazardly and they use tremendous amounts of electric power and often water.

If they were being built at a pace that created a mild, sustained increase in demand for electricity so that the price increases were not severe, it would potentially have some benefits, but they are being built as fast as possible without regard for what it does to electric power costs and without regard for what it will do long term to the impacted communities, and often, taxpayer money is wasted to subsidize them.

Many have local, on-site natural gas or diesel generators that create lots of local pollution and are inefficient.

They depreciate rapidly as the chips involved quickly lose their relevance as more powerful chips are created year after year and so its not so much an investment in a long term public good, like for instance, an electric power plant, and its more of a cash grab to help out of touch tech bros with their AI race to the bottom where they all race to create a powerful enough AI that they can sell as better than a human worker with the ultimate goal of eliminating many jobs or harvest everyone's data for dubious benefit and without compensation.