China has a very different climate and landmass. The reason these companies keep trying to make datacenters in places where they’ll use all the water the residents need to survive, is because those places are the cheapest to build and opperate. Land in the desert is dirt-cheap (lol). China doesn’t have to build in the desert to build on cheap land, and so can build pretty much whereever they feel like it, including where water and electricity isn’t an issue.

Also, they’ve shown before that they don’t really have to give a shit about the lives of local residents. They probably (maybe) don’t want them to die, but relocation is always an option.

In the end we probably don’t know wether people are pissed about it or not, since we don’t get a lot of news from rural China.