It would be wasting a lot more of earth's resources to build those "space data centers" + bring them into space from earth + maintain them in space.

I thought we were utilizing district heating to move the heat rather than underground data centers, but admittedly I haven't been following the news that closely. Still, I don't remember seeing any news about underground data centers - it's always above the ground, and we seem to have a lot of news about new data centers these days.

And about what a detriment they are to people and animals.

How would district heating help any of the problems with data centers?

I don't think they're much of a problem to people here. They're usually built far enough from people, I think, and it's a relatively cool climate here anyway. The only major downside of data centers getting publicity here is the potential to increase electricity prices, and even that's just potential so far - not enough data centers to have much effect yet, although there's an initiative to tackle that too. Your mileage may vary, of course, but that's how it seems to be over here.

They're definitely a detriment to nature, but I reckon at least here they don't particularly stand out from other development (at least yet).

District heating helps with the heat island effect, I would imagine, since heat is moved where it's needed instead of left to dissipate into the surrounding nature. It also reduces the need for other methods of heating, which requires energy.

Well, this is what quick query gave me:

- The Cathedral Bomb Shelter (Helsinki)

One of the earliest and most famous examples is located directly beneath Helsinki's historic 19th-century Uspenski Cathedral. Deep in the granite underneath the church sits a former WWII bomb shelter that was converted into an underground data center. The energy company Helen captures the server heat, boosts it, and distributes it to heat roughly 500 nearby homes.

- The Mäntsälä Cave Facility

In the town of Mäntsälä, a large data center built into a former underground cave/quarry recovers tens of thousands of megawatt-hours of energy annually. The system captures enough excess thermal energy to supply more than two-thirds of the entire town's heating demand, drastically lowering local energy costs and eliminating the need to burn fossil fuels for winter warmth.

- Fortum

Microsoft built a massive data center region in the capital area where the waste heat is recycled into the Fortum utility network. It is designed to cover roughly 40% of the district heating needs for the major neighboring cities of Espoo and Kirkkonummi, cleanly warming around 250,000 users.

- Hamina

Google’s Hamina data center campus routes its computational thermal runoff into the local grid, providing up to 80% of Hamina's annual district heating demand

I find it really clever use of heat that is byproduct of data centers. Of course, as someone who actually lives there, you are certainly privy to much more info about ins and outs of all of it. 

Interesting, thanks for letting me know! The first two definitely sound underground, the latter two not. The one in Hamina has been there for a while now, and there have been some expansions - all above ground, most likely. The one done in cooperation between Microsoft and Fortum also sounds like it won't be underground, but it sounds like it's been designed for heat distribution from the start. Regardless, those underground facilities sound neat too!

And yeah, utilizing the excess heat is very nice. I recall reading that data centers don't suffice for heating a ton of buildings, but it's definitely better than wasting all that heat, and the more data centers we get, the more buildings they will probably end up providing heat for.

The tech won't arrive in time. SpaceX wants to make it cheaper to place datacenters in space than to build one from scratch by the end of the decade, but factor in Musk's typical overpromising, plus heat-dissipation concerns that are yet to be addressed, and that's easily a ~2040 target.

Depending on your timeline, that makes it far more likely that the first AGI will be created in Earth's data centers instead.

Has putting some data centers underground reduced the noise pollution?

And what about harvesting water from the sea and filtering it for data center cooling? It would lower the strain on freshwater sources and combat rising sea levels.

I don't know if that's commonly done around the world, but it's definitely a thing in at least the Google data center located in Hamina, Finland (one of thte the data centers mentioned by HoloDust earlier). Sounds like there might be some challenges with that approach, and it probably works best in cooler regions, but it definitely seems to be a viable solution at least under suitable circumstances.

Of course using sea water for cooling probably requires the data center to be located near the coast.

Oh, and dumping warm water back into a cooler area might have some undesirable effects. It's probably a very local thing, but again, pick your poison, I guess.