Eh? These processes liberate vast amounts of heavy metals, arsenic and other environmental contaminants, making byproducts like poil and tailings are super toxic and expensive to deal with, and mining companies have a tendency to vanish before the cleanup is done. When these leak or fail, they often do so into water supplies for cities or isolated communities who have the serial insults of being displaced and then poisoned. Have a search for “tailings dam failures” or superfund sites, for that matter.
The lands in question in the Pilbara are the ancestral property of various first nations, and after a couple of centuries of it, are a bit wary of blokes turning up saying “well we need your resources we’re taking them.”
There are complex and intersecting interests here, and the tech industry acting like resources in someone’s country are there for the tech industry to exploit as of right, are a really good example of how colonialism continues to cause suffering and the inequalities it promises to emancipate us from.