Several of the claims of on-site water pollution that I've looked into were clearly bullshit, basically unrelated to a building being a data center at all; and I have no reason to think that the claims of people being impacted by excessive noise pollution aren't also bullshit - indeed, the most plausible way this could be happening is that some data center operators are using fossil fuel generators to generate electric power in the absence of local grid capacity too close to residential areas, which is also not particularly related to buildings being data centers as such and is more of an indictment of the American power grid. But you can also power a data center with solar panels in the right location and I don't trust that this isn't also a thing people are exaggerating or lying about because random ordinary people have a folk environmentalist hatred of built structures and the media reporting on them is afraid of AI.
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Several of the claims of on-site water pollution that I've looked into were clearly bullshit, basically unrelated to a building being a data center at all; and I have no reason to think that the claims of people being impacted by excessive noise pollution aren't also bullshit - indeed, the most plausible way this could be happening is that some data center operators are using fossil fuel generators to generate electric power in the absence of local grid capacity too close to residential areas, which is also not particularly related to buildings being data centers as such and is more of an indictment of the American power grid. But you can also power a data center with solar panels in the right location and I don't trust that this isn't also a thing people are exaggerating or lying about because random ordinary people have a folk environmentalist hatred of built structures and the media reporting on them is afraid of AI.