What you seem to be asking asking is if this is just NIMBYism or not. And it's not. At least, I'm not a NIMBY. As an example, just recently I commented on how NIMBYism added billions of points to the UK's HS2 project by building a completely unnecessary tunnel to protect the views of some of the UK's wealthiest landowners [1].

Tax breaks for business have always been ontroversial. I think it's always been a false economy and businesses have effectively played 50 states off of each other to get tax breaks they don't need and they don't pay tor themselves. Some of the examples of this are almost comical. A great example of the hundreds of millions spent to entice businesses back and forth between Kansas City, KS and Kansas City, MO, which are literally right next to each other [2].

Oh, and the tax breaks given to stadiums are particularly disgusting unless th emncipality owns the team in question in part or in whole and AFAIK in any top tier sports league, there's only one example of that (ie the Green Bay Packers) and the NFL has made that ownership structure illegal.

But anyway, data centers don't create employment so the usual arguments of "they'll go elsewhere" that were used at the time it was a factory or an auto plant don't apply. Yet they get pedlled out anyway. Residents don't want them and it still happens.

Two points I want to comment on from your list.

The first is you qualified self-generated electricity as green. this is a good and important qualifier. The alternative is what Elon did in Memphis [3], which should be illegal regardless.

The second is the water. That's going to be difficult no matter where you build these things. The big issue there is that data centers add pollutants to the water to keep their pipes clean. That too should be illegal. If you were just, for example, using cold sea or river or lake water for cooling then it wouldn't be a big deal. But data centers don't want that. It might corrode their precious pipes. They might need maintenance more often. Or you could use a heat exchange system where water is used for cooling and you can add what you want to it but it's in a closed loop and external water is used to cool it. This is what nucleaer reactors do. But that too is more expensive.

Now if someone was going to build one of these things out in New Mexico or Arizona that have large stretches of uninhabited land and plentiful sunshine (for solar) it would be a different conversation. Of course, water would be an issue there.

Data centers are a massive wealth transfer from the poor to the wealthy. That's really the crux of the problem.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48350761

[2]: https://www.mackinac.org/the-left-and-right-agree-to-end-tax...

[3]: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/22/epa-thwarts-musks-d...