There a few factors at play. I believe China has launched a very successful campaign of misinformation in order to slow down US progress and allow them to “win” the “AI War”. Then climate activists and let’s be frank far left leaning people have taken the bait hook line and sinker and amplified it.

Second Anthropic at the start was very vocal about datacenter doom. Their motivate besides wanting regulatory capture is again slow down their competitors and corner the market.

Lastly mainstream media loves a good doomer story of tech people getting rich displacing working class Americans while “destroying earth”.