Data centers being built by me - more than 20. A friend of mine works for an audio engineering firm and shared that the tech does not really exist yet to do more than get the modern data centers within city noise ordinances. You are going to hear them for a couple miles. As if I needed convincing he was legit - last week his coworker got flown out to my neck of the woods to conduct a study on the planned DC's in my town.
The opposition, though. They are not armed with sensible facts when they show up to city council meetings. They are armed with clickbaity headlines. I joined the local DC opposition group to offer advice on how to get the city to take them more seriously and was quickly banned for talking sense.
I've long suspected that monied interests are seeding social media with weak arguments about water as a distraction, and people mindlessly re-share that as part of their identity. Then the other half can come along and "correct" them while the main issue of power is forgotten. Social media gets engagement, and capital gets its data centers.
It's the same tired pattern we've seen for a long time now in politics, and they keep rolling it out because it works.
On the flip side a lot of people's jobs are likely being threatened by the technology, so there is sizeable receptive audience already.
They don't need any more incentive or backing from monied interests, really. However I'm also pretty sure a lot of players are engaging in submarine warfare as well (https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html).
Because they are the monied interests.
What they don't want is for the conversation to turn from people blindly rejecting data centers (for any reason) to people saying wait a minute, let's embrace technology/AI but let users benefit from every aspect instead of being capital's bitch every second the day.