I don’t really see as how this has much to do with large tech companies.

Electricity is electricity. Tech companies aren’t generally setting the type of electricity available. If you want power generation to emit less pollution, that’s fine, but the end user doesn’t have a lot to do with that.

There are only really two points that I see that are peripherally-specific:

• The first is that some datacenters have backup generators for power outages. Not all power consumers will have backup generators, so in an outage, they’ll just go without power instead of firing up backup generators. While that’s true, that doesn’t seem all that interesting; I can’t imagine that datacenters are spending much time running on backup generators (and datacenters surely have good reason to not want to do so, as that’s an expensive form of power; there’s a reason that it’s a backup rather than a primary source of power). But, okay, let’s say that backup generators are used heavily. In that case, you’d want to attach some kind of surcharge to generators, (or at least diesel generators, if natural gas generators are less of an issue) as any generator operation would create some level of pollution. That’s not really specific to datacenters, but to users of backup generators.

• The second is that datacenters may be more-location-agnostic than some other companies, so they might be more-readily placed in remote locations near a similarly-remote power plant, where local air pollution from the power plant doesn’t affect humans as much. I mean, okay, maybe that’s true; I don’t know the ratio of workers to power consumption, but I can believe that a datacenter might have fewer people than an automated factory per until of power consumed. But that still doesn’t seem like it has much to do with tech companies. If local air pollution near population centers has a cost, then you attach a fee to that, which will encourage power generation to move away from population centers. As long as utility companies can price in transport costs, then that’ll cause datacenters to take that into account. There’s nothing terribly special about datacenters from a market standpoint – you just need any externalities from power generation to be internalized, and that’ll cause consumers of power to take that into account in choosing location.