Reposting from stopwatchstring's comment:

> On the other hand, why aren’t we just building all this shit in the vast emptiness in the middle of the country anyway? Hmm.

Exactly. You have a power-hungry asset that needs few humans to operate, causes severe noise pollution, and can effectively be located anywhere in CONUS with minimal latency impact.

Imho, what federal and state governments should be doing is fast-tracking power and network infra to agreed locations in the mid and southwest, ideally in areas suited to solar and wind.

Pre-zone the land around for the desired mix of power + datacenter, then let private industry build what they want.

There's entirely too much empty land to make building in {small town} make any goddamn sense.