Datacenter & AI water use is overblown

This keeps coming up over and over; for those interfacing with the anti-AI / anti-DC crowd, this article has some good talking points, about water, but also jobs and power.

Data centers certainly do use water. They are basically warehouses of tightly packed, high-powered computers, and when computers run, they get hot. Most data centers—though not all—use water for cooling. But many of them use a “closed loop,” which doesn’t actually waste much, because the water is recycled repeatedly for the same purpose. And many statistics about data centers’ water use are misleading in that they include “indirect” water use too. The Substack writer Andy Masley found one particularly absurd example: In a widely cited paper, the amount of water that AI supposedly “wastes” includes the water that naturally evaporates off rivers and lakes in Washington State. Why? Because those rivers and lakes are dammed for hydroelectric plants, which generate electricity, which is then used by (among other things) a data center. The water-quality issue AOC pointed out in Georgia is not a general feature of data-center construction and appears to have affected only four households.