Data centres are designated as Critical National Infrastructure. If a local authority attempts to deny planning permission for a new data centre, central government will almost always override their decision.
Multiple theories of consciousness posit that recurrent feedback loops are necessary for consciousness i.e. that consciousness can occur in recurrent neural networks but not in feedforward neural networks.
ASI probably won't be a purely feedforward network. But it probably won't have anywhere near as many recurrent feedback loops as the human brain. The leading generative AI models currently use a transformer architecture which is basically relies on feedforward networks that are coupled to attention mechanisms.
Deep feedforward neural networks are difficult to achieve biologically. The human cerebellum is effectively a shallow feedforward network with only one hidden layer. Meanwhile the cortex is one giant recurrent neural network.
Recurrent neural networks are difficult to train due to exploding/vanishing gradient problems. There's ways to work around these problems e.g. gradient clipping and batch normalisation. In fact some people believe that the function of NREM sleep is to normalise synaptic weights so as to prevent exploding/vanishing gradients c.f. sleep homeostasis hypothesis and all its variants. However, no matter how you look at it, deep feedforward neural networks and hybrid architectures like transformers are vastly superior to recurrent neural networks.
The human brain is also hampered by its inability to do proper backpropagation. Brains have some impressive capabilities, but only because they have a lot of neurons and a lot of synapses. Scale up AI to have the same parameter count as the human brain and it will be way better than us at everything.
If ASI is going to be only minimally conscious then that makes it more dangerous. Good luck trying to get it to care about the welfare of conscious beings if consciousness isn't a core part of its ontology.
The whole of humanity is tied to the tracks. The train is due to run everyone over in a few years time. Despite being tied to the tracks yourself, you can just about reach the lever to divert the train onto an empty track. However there is a slower moving train also heading your way and if you pull your lever but Xi Jinping doesn't pull his lever to divert the other train then all you will have achieved is to delay human extinction by a year or so. There are also some modest immediate economic benefits to allowing the train to continue along its current course.