"If they require the datacenter to be a closed water system and pay for their own electricity..."

This assertion is doing a LOT of heavy lifting, and when it isn't true, it can cause huge externalities not just for the local community but possibly an entire region. It also does not address the noise problem.

Additionally, your jobs estimates are likely high and include short-term construction jobs which may not even go to locals anyway.

"Pay for their own electricity" is just not an actual thing that seems to be doable at this scale without those externalities. You're talking about sites that are, say, 800MW or 1GW or more... these use more power than tens of thousands of homes, and require entirely new power plants, interconnects, lines run, transformer costs, staff, etc. Typically, power companies amortize those costs and spread them over ratepayers, and when it's just part of the normal induced load of population growth, that's just how things go, and the system works.

In these cases, the rates that these DCs are paying for power are nowhere close to being able to fully absorb or offset the additional CapEx that the power companies are suddenly tasked with, even if they put up, say, the capital for IC, which is usually what's required. So the remaining new shortfalls get spread over the remaining ratepayers, ie, everyone else. If the demand wasn't induced by the build of these massive sites that, strictly speaking, aren't "necessary," then the rates wouldn't have to climb to accommodate them.

Frankly, there should be laws against power companies raising ratepayer rates to accommodate infrastructure investments driven solely by DC/fab load inducement.

It is way better than wasting power on house heating and watering your lawns. It actually creates economic value.

Heating homes keeps humans alive who then go onto work, creating economic value.

A DC supplies, like, 12 jobs maybe. The 10,000 homes worth of power it uses supplies 20,000 jobs, maybe more if some older kids are working at the local Dairy Queen.

No, you don't understand. Sending bytes back and forth creates real economic value. We shouldn't heat homes and have supermarkets in this day and age, the margins are miniscule.

This is deranged. It's like saying entire economy hinges on underwear manufacturing because everyone needs one pair.

Yes, if we stopped making underwear the economy would suffer a lot. That's just plainly true, I don't know why you perceive reality as "deranged". I believe they make medication for that, you might look into it.

Human needs are a prerequisite for human productivity. Heating is actually more important than data centers. I think 99% of people would agree with me on that.

You can't see difference between "important" and economic value?

Are you just trying to be annoying and pedantic or do you secretly have a point you're trying to make? Because I'm not gonna try to guess your argument for you and then argue against it.

Heating has value because PEOPLE FUCKING PAY FOR IT.

Do you know what we call assigning monetary value to a service? Value. That's value.

So do datacenters. Vastly more than you.