Ignorance. Ignorance of the facts on the ground and the politics of the moment.
Do you honestly believe that the ledger for automation has zero items in the "liabilities" column? Do you think that 100% of people whose job is displaced find another job in a reasonable amount of time and on the same order or pay / status?
Do you believe that neighbors of recently built data centers have nothing to complain about?
The truth is that "data center politics" is happening in the context of post-NAFTA offshoring of lots of jobs/industry, post-manufacturing migration to the South, post-hollowing of labor unions, and in the context of Trump's War on Immigration (where AI companies have likened their product to "infinite AI immigrants").
Even the White House's Ratepayer Protection Pledge (a laudable goal) event was undermined by POTUS's speech at the event. Instead of even pretending to listen to the people who are hesitant about first and second order effects of data center buildouts, he encouraged developers to push the projects through ASAP and ignore all of the naysayers. It's clear this entire project is to maximize commercial advancement, not benefit people or give voice to voters/constituents.
And in a moment where we are told we have to do this ASAP because "we are in a race with China" but nobody can explain the race. It's not for AGI because China doesn't expect it to yield AGI. Perhaps Zuckerberg does, but he was wrong about crypto, then Metaverse, then open weights models training (before he returned to open weights). The US seems to be using LLMs wrong as a glorified DEI detector (DOGE using LLMs to enforce their political homodoxy) and to identify schools in Iran to bomb + double tap.
China has reasonable regulations on LLMs to protect their society whereas our "regulations" seem to be the Amazon CEO texting David Sachs on a Friday evening to warn about cybersecurity in a misunderstanding between what Mythos (prerelease for select privileged users) and Fable (general release with lots of moderation controls) and the nature of the cybersecurity vulnerabilities found (they were able to be replicated with other non-Claude models).
We are being outwitted by ourselves. The problem isn't the people anxious about data centers or AI. It's the clueless leaders who don't bother to anticipate the obvious outcomes of their decisions and execute a plan to mitigate it. And you desire "feeling awe" so much that you don't want to recognize that politics means not everybody is going to succumb to the same feeling of awe, and that's okay.