I was thinking of the emissions from 'temporary' gas-powered electric generators in the USA.

Improving the electrical production system would be fine, but it needs to be paid for upfront by the datacentre and ideally completed no later than the datacentre. Otherwise citizens end up paying for this on their electricity bills, as is happening in Ireland [1], and other electrical upgrades (factories etc) can't be done as there isn't the capacity. (I think the limit here is trained engineers to design and build the power plants and distribution networks.)

We have at least 4 new-ish hyperscale datacentres in Denmark, one each from Microsoft, Meta, Google and Apple. I think they're here for the renewable power, and at least the Meta and Microsoft ones are putting their waste heat into the local district heating systems. Some of them have indirectly financed construction of renewable power.

But the energy used is enormous! [3] says data centres were 10% of electricity generation in 2020, before the massive increase in GPUs.

They are built on the promise of high-paid jobs, but that turns out to be 20 technicians and a few security guards [2].

I haven't looked into it, but I assume there are no "profits" from big-tech datacentres leading to additional tax payments, unlike e.g. a factory.

[1] https://www.friendsoftheearth.ie/news/the-cost-of-data-centr...

[2] https://ing.dk/artikel/how-few-people-work-tech-giants-data-... — just 450 full time staff for the big-tech datacentres in Denmark — seems to 1-2 each for MS, Meta, Google and Apple.

[3] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2020.116928