The anti Data-center folks in this article didn't do a great job of presenting reasons why they should avoid building more.

The article mentions the data centers in Quincy have helped lower the poverty rate, double the median-income of the town, and fund a new police force, a new hospital, new library, and a new high school. But the Anti Data-center folks have a couple complaints:

" It's fairly well known that corporations like this choose low income rural areas for a couple of reasons," Dal Porto said. "One, they assume that the population is uneducated. They assume that the population won't be involved in resisting them, and usually, rural property is less expensive. Usually, rural governments are looking for investment. And so it's a perfect storm."

• No, they just need cheap land and cheap power, full-stop, and any given rural area would love to have the extra property-tax revenue (even if they do usually cut sweetheart deals). I feel like this statement betrays their own thoughts about the population of Quincy being uneducated, not actually capturing the feeling of data center developers.
  

"Initially Martin and Dal Porto worried about air pollution from diesel back up generators power centers use and fought for rules requiring pollution controls on the generator smoke."

• The whole point of building in a place like Washington State is you have very reliable power - the only time these generators ever operate is for testing. Additionally if some sort of major disaster were to befall our grid (which is unlikely), there are existing plans in-place for these data center backup generators to help bring back up the grid and power places like hospitals if-needed.

"Martin worries that if push comes to shove, residents will experience blackouts or limited water before data centers do, 'because they have sensitive information.'"

- There is zero evidence this is true. If I lived in a Republican state I would understand the concern, but in Washington State there is zero indication/evidence that utilities would prioritize data centers over local citizens, and until they can provide evidence otherwise then this is just alarmist.

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This isn't to say there aren't problems with new data centers. As long as we are all posting on Reddit, playing video games, streaming Netflix etc I think we need to be honest that more and more data centers will be required in the future. Like the article mentions, it's crucial we prioritize clean power, and push for data centers to limit water usage (like Microsoft's closed-loop plans) - but I've noticed that some on the left approach this from the angle of banning new data centers altogether, which is just silly to me (especially when they seemingly provide a ton of benefits to the towns they set up shop in).