You are engaging in the "but you participate in society" fallacy.
One can critique systems they are still interacting with, to suggest otherwise is just so incredibly lazy.
One can critique systems they are still interacting with, to suggest otherwise is just so incredibly lazy.
So, my take is that maybe the pro-DC side can do better at seeing multiple perspectives instead of acting like anything negatively said about DCs is a psychosis.
Those things are both a result of a failure of government, not the existence of data centres. If there are externalised costs the company wants to put on people then your government should extract them from the company as a condition of permission.
Data centres are factories that turn electricity into heat and money. They're basically the nicest factories possible. There is no fundamental reason they need to harm people, any issues data centres cause should be easy to address as a fraction of the already massive sums involved.
In a metal foundry some of the physical externality is intrinsic to doing the process. It's a continuous industrial chemical operation emitting smoke, metal fumes, VOCs, dust, sound etc. You can capture 99% of pollution, but you're still melting, casting, shaking out and finishing tonnes of hot metal and sand. Complete physical isolation is expensive and imperfect.
With data centres, most local externalities are engineering choices. With enough money and sensible siting, you could plausibly build one whose effect on neighbouring residents is extremely close to nil. The biggest remaining externalities occur upstream in the electricity/water/grid system - and those are unusually amenable to being charged directly to the operator.
If a local data centre is impacting you negatively it's a failure of your government because it didn't need to be that way. It's not an intrinsic part of data centre operation. They turn electricity into heat and money, a comparatively simple factory to have completely deal with its own externalities.
I'm not saying tylenol is bad. I'm not saying it's good. I'm just pointing out that your position is equivalent to opposing a person saying "lets no shove 20 tylenol down someone's throat" with the argument "but one has reduced the fever".