Comment by troyvit

Is this a yes-and kind of thing or a no-but? I'm asking because maybe water serves as a good indicator for the other resource consumption issues around data-centers. Most of the water issues are are directly related to the energy and rare-earth issues you're talking about. This paper covers the scope of energy, consumption, and downstream water usage for servers:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3724499

So yeah, I don't think water is a red herring but more like a canary.