Well, unlike you, experts are worried. Consider how knowledge is gathered, stored, and disseminated. AI interferes with each of these steps in dramatic ways.

data centers are like a meat processing plants

…which cause ecological devastation at an unimaginable scale and give poor communities cancer, so your comparison is apt.

purify wastewater and generate their own clean energy

These are jobs for other facilities.

Not anymore. Townships cannot be made responsible for the pet projects of billionaires, nor is it their job to subsidize the internet. Get your own water and clean energy or fuck off.

I want to emphasize that this is a massive compromise since my first choice is [redacted].

That poor rural communities should subsidize data centers’ water and electrical consumption so that random websites can be cheaper to maintain is a weird argument but okay.

Data centers are currently unregulated, inefficient, ecologically destructive resource pits parasitical on poor communities. That’s the problem. A simple solution would be to sell them water and electricity at 1000x the cost per gallon of a regular household. If that doesn’t encourage innovation, just require data centers to purify wastewater and generate their own clean energy! Problem solved.