Comment by shadowgovt

Honestly, the water usage isn't the real issue - the electricity use during a climate crisis is. It's also a huge climate opportunity, because datacenter growth is basically gluing a giant pipe of financer money straight into datacenter and support buildout, and if we passed laws requiring the new electrical capacity be 100% renewable... They'd still spend the money, they're convinced this is the future so no cost is too high (an assertion I feel confident making because we're literally experimenting with putting datacenters in space right now).

Water use has locally been an issue in places where municipalities were taken advantage of and their local water supply management laws weren't set up to account for a giant consumer to just roll up and start pulling past replenishment rate. But there's nothing about datacenters that demand that be the case; those places were cheap to build in (and why they were cheap to build in should probably be its own graduate political theory thesis / series of fraud and mismanagement investigations and prosecutions).