I really think that it comes down to poor policy and investment. I say poor investment because the focus has never been on what is good for the world or the masses. The strong demand for data centers is strongly associated with the boom in AI and the computational expenses and demand that comes with it. Generative AI models are massive and are really computationally expensive. However, there needs to be more of a push in optimizing resources and energy and quantum might be a way to do so? Another issue is that people are brute forcing generative AI for everything and all it does is a) produce poor quality work b) hinder one's critical thinking capabilities. With all this, we are wasting energy and resources like it is nothing. Now, quantum may be a way to address energy consumption and the actual computation side of things. There also hasn't been adequate investment or effort in the energy domain, especially given the issues that global warming presents.
This is another example of how AI is hurting the rest of the tech industry. Data centers are important for much of modern life, but the general public has internalized that data centers = AI. The issue isn’t whether data centers should be built, the issue is how they’re built and for what purpose. But I don’t think the general public understands the technology enough to make that distinction.