That's fair. The nuance that people lose is more that people are often painting them all with the same brush. Protesting any datacenter regardless of impact.

It becomes something like: "datacenters are evil and are a symbol of techno fascist distopia! If they build a datacenter in my city, the taps will run dry and Elon Musk will use it to make ai porn of my children!" Even if it's a small solar powered closed loop that provides VPS, storage and web hosting for nerds and small businesses.

I also do think there's also a scale of evil there. Some environmental impacts are not immediately obvious and might not be known about during planning. Some were built a long time ago with older tech and are a bit shitty but have a plan to transition to be more sustainable, etc.

The world is full of "alright but a little bit shit." It's not all perfect angels and mustache twirling villains.

I don't want to detract too much from the real villains though. Nobody needs a 9GW datacity for military ai.