No, you're not understanding that there are other types of datacenters.

A datacenter is a building with a lot of computers. Not all of them are AI related, and in fact most aren't.
Easily more than 90% of everything on the Internet and all telecommunications runs out of a datacenter.

The thing people are currently, rightly, being opposed to are hyper scale data centers. Those tend to be filled with things like AI training or massive web services where all the pieces need to be close to each other to work efficiently.

Most data centers are similar in size and environmental impact to a shipping warehouse, but with power consumption a fair bit higher.
Any midsize city will have at least a few, if for no other reason than to handle telecommunications, and many businesses will have their own small one near their offices.

Everything in a capitalist society serves profit to its owners. That doesn't mean it doesn't serve a good we want to have around. It'd certainly be better and more efficient if my local telecom hub or hospital were publicly owned and managed with a service motive above a profit motive, but they're not and I'd rather have both than not.

What I don't need is open AI building a datacenter 32 times larger than the hospital and 128 times larger the the telecom hub to train AI models, fuck up the water and double my power bill.

Where do you think your Lemmy instance is hosted? How do you think your call gets router when you call your mom?

That's just called a business.

I happily rent a server so I can serve the thousands of users that interact with the FOSS project I'm part of.