Tbh I think the "but data centers are important infrastructure, not just AI" talking point misses that like
Ok so roads are important infrastructure. A lot of stuff that's important happens on roads. Now, let's imagine that quadrillionaire Matt Stench has decided that the next big tech innovation is the Wide Car. It's a car that takes up six lanes despite seating only one passenger.
The Wide Car is supposed to be the future, and everyone's going to be driving Wide Cars, even though nobody who makes Wide Cars is turning a profit. Employers are offering Wide Cars as an employee benefit, and getting "nah." Some employers are going as far as demanding their employees drive Wide Cars, and the result is that people take time out of their workdays to get in the mandatory gas usage for their Wide Car before driving home in a regular car.
In spite of the fact that the Wide Car is clearly set to fail, there's an enormous push to expand to twelve-lane roads to accommodate a bunch of Wide Cars that simply will not materialize. This is not an organic response to demand, but a speculative investment that amplifies the existing issues with road development for no good reason.
That is the problem.
Imagine if Trump said he was ordering the DOT to quadruple the length of the Interstate Highway System because he doesn't want China to have more freeway miles than us since it makes us look weak, and suddenly the entire road construction industry was funneled into building hundreds of thousands of miles of new freeways, and the freeways DIDN'T EVEN FUCKING GO ANYWHERE. Not serving homes, not serving business, just fucking useless. Except to manufacture demand for these roads, every major company started routing all their trucks over much longer routes just to use the new freeways, and all the GPS guidance software e.g. Google Maps, Apple Maps, etc. started intentionally routing you over the new roads to nowhere even if it took 3x as long to get to your destination, just to artificially improve the usage stats of the new freeways to justify their construction.
Meanwhile, nobody is fixing the potholes in the streets where you live because all the resources are going into building useless freeways that nobody asked for.
(Disclaimer: analogy is US-specific but the problem is I think it would be difficult to come up with 'imagine your city built a fuckton of extra roads that no one asked for and then made all the homes and businesses really far apart and gave you a longer commute' scenarios that would be relatable but still hypothetical to people in most countries that aren't just a verbatim description of most US cities' urban planning policy)
