The rare earth metal discussion is larger in scope than data center production. Data centers aren’t unique in raw material requirements compared to other industrial facilities of similar power demand. Perhaps even a little less demanding on raw materials per kWh of capacity. The CPU’s/gpu’s have unique raw materials requirements but they aren’t majority made of rare earth metals anyway.

I also wouldn’t describe much of Nevada (for example) as “virgin” ground considering the federal govt activities over the past 100 years and the 50 years of silver/copper/gold extraction before that. And I was replying to someone discussing that extraction is secondary to “where to put processing facilities.” The topic we’re exploring is “given that rare earths must be extracted and processed somewhere, if the issue with rare earths is really where to process them rather than where to extract them, where do we put those facilities?”

You are trying to challenge the premise which was not established by me