We have a county reservoir and our idiot leaders have made a deal with Amazon to give them 40% of the reservoir capacity. That is a big problem, especially now what we are in a drought in the springtime.

I mean, assuming we are discussing the US where almost all datacenters are being built -

the real thing to realize is not that datacenters are bad (I'm kinda ambivalent), nor that meat is bad, but that poorly written water rights laws are bad. Which is why we grow some of our most water-intensive crops in some of our driest areas and some farmers end up just flooding the desert with water for no reason each year. Restructuring water rights would massively reduce water usage while maintaining food production for the simple reason that then we would stop growing alfalfa in Pheonix

“But surviving uses more resources than generating value for the shareholders. Why are you so selfish?”

I keep seeing this argument and it stinks of astroturfing. Probably to portray data centers the same as farms: a resource-intensive but necessary infrastructure. If they wanted to make a good faith argument, it would be good courses, not farms. And I could also go without golf.

Focusing solely on water consumption with these arguments is another red flag. Its easy to find false equivalencies with water, but no other project demands double the power output of the entire state it's in, and not many other projects have as bad a ratio of taxpayer dollars spent to revenue or services generated.

We can shut down 90% of datacenters today, suffer a slight inconvinience to our lives and keep living.

We have a farm failure...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

Some datacenters are still built with cooling towers instead of chillers. I know for a fact Amazon does this. They are slightly cheaper, but massively wasteful. I think we need better laws for the irresponsible companies, but this is not most datacenter companies. If I heard a Google datacenter was going up near me, I would not care. If I heard an Amazon one was, I would be organizing against it as hard as possible.

The point you are DELIBERATELY missing is that farms use so much water than AI data centres that the amount data centres use is irrelevant. The water usage claims are so ridiculously overblown and so obviously stupid that it's appalling that people believe them! I have seen people genuinely claim that water used in data centres is destroyed and can never be recovered, or that it's polluted so badly it can never be cleaned. Farms not only use multiple orders of magnitude more water, they also pollute it a hell of a lot more so it's far more difficult to clean and more damaging to the environment. A lot of the claimed numbers come from one person who got gallons and megalitres confused! Just stop spreading this utter nonsense! <haters will not respond with downvotes for calling them out, and more repeatedly debunked nonsense, because they always do, they're really dull as well as annoying!>