Yes. These are waste products generated by chip manufacturing, not by using computers that include chips that have already been manufactured elsewhere.
> Where do people think the toxic wastes from these processes end up?
Hopefully, they end up neutralized at the site of their production. In the worst case, they may end up creating pollution around the locations where the chips are being manufactured, in which case the chip manufacturers should definitely be held responsible for the externalities they create.
Could you elaborate on how this relates to data centers?
> Plus the emissions from the freight across different modalities which scales linearly with massiveness of the tonnage.
And scales not at all in relation to what categories of products are included in that tonnage. This seems to be another instance of cherry-picking a single use case to blame for the externalities of a services that's used by essentially everything else too -- the solution here is to find cleaner ways of fueling cargo ships, just as we need to find cleaner ways of fueling power plants, since it is not reasonable to expect any net reduction in demand for either cargo shipping or for electricity.
> And that's before you even consider the power needs of development when it exceeds the clean energy available at any one time.
This should be a strong impetus for expanding clean energy production. There's little point in complaining about any specific application of electricity if it's not meant to advocate for generating more power with less pollution.