Once you get rid of "USA is a specially broken place", you're truly left only with noise pollution, which is workable to deal with and its costs can in fact be taken by developer. Hell, existing industrial zones or ex-factory land is normally preferred elsewhere.
The US has a corruption problem, which is not exceptional - I don't know what place you're comparing the US to that doesn't give the rich money and the right of way where and when they want.
People say it's a "race to the bottom" without realizing what that implies. It implies that data centers will simply get deals in localities that will not benefit from data centers if other places demand that they at least pay for themselves. Why would that happen? It happens because it will personally benefit the people who have been charged with making the decision.
> Once you get rid of "USA is a specially broken place"
Again, compared to who? You think they'll have an easier time in Europe? You think if they want to build them in Peru that the residents will benefit?
Note, I am saying specifically on this topic, I am not saying there are no other kinds of grift available.
But I have done recently a deep dive and for example in Poland, especially in the area around Warsaw, a high power datacenter is literally one of the best investments you can get, and the only real issue is to force the builder to use certain noise abatement technologies to deal with the low-frequency noise.
And while it's a race to the bottom, that does not mean that there are no other variables than price - for example, outside of AI, a large boom in EU datacenter space is due to DORA and NIS2 regulations that place certain requirements on locality and resilience
Noise requires certain extra investment at building time but can be very much mitigated below 40dB. At mid-scales (12~15 MW usable power) you can have a datacenter pretty much beside residential building and it will be the quieter one.
It really is a bizarre place to live... it's both the richest nation in the world, but also uniquely broken in many really sad and confusing ways.
A lot of the problems can't happen in popular datacenter-buildout areas in Poland because the local government cannot change anything about taxes nor can it give any sort of tax break and the most sweetheart deal thing you could pull is water pricing and that is also hard to sell. Nationwide rules set which government levels get what part of the taxes levied on the datacenter, and because of how what USA would call "property taxes" are calculated, there's considerable pressure for owner of the DC to get paying tenants to pay for them.
Even at maximum imaginable tax "optimization", a DC is one of the best RoI things a local government can have in Poland
Because if you're asking for them to refocus from data centers to corrupt politicians, I can confidently predict the outcome, and I believe so can you.
In Aus, when anyone makes an application to connect to the electricity network, you get charged for ALL upstream upgrades to service your load. That might mean new powerlines, new substations upstream etc. That both shifts the load onto the DC operator AND moves them to areas where spare capacity is available.
Similar thing applies for a water connection.
Datacentres still technically drive up spot price for electricity but with the amount of new generation coming online that will even out over time. We're building DCs like crazy here and the average spot price is actually falling.
Both are solvable with politicians who can be held accountable. But, in many locations, they aren't accountable and can only be trusted to do what's in the interest of their largest donors.
That's all ignoring the various other externalities... aesthetics, noise, pollution.
But, 100%, if a county/town has an underutilized industrial zone, they should build data centers there. But, it also appears data center developers prefer undeveloped plots. Again, also solvable, but somebody needs to do so.