What revenues are provided to the locals (people, or government) from data centre operators aside from taxes on water/power? Once constructed, they provide few jobs, and their services are used wherever the network touches. It's not like the presence of a data centre spawns a lot of tech related construction (offices, cloud servers, Starbucks, ...).

At least a warehouse (today, anyway) hires warm bodies to schlepp goods around. Those electrons move themselves. Thinking about it again, it's basically colonization. The data centre owner drops a box that consumes local resources and is expected to purchase finished goods.