This is incredibly meaningless reporting. Water use for all of AI is inconsequential compared to agriculture. In addition, water is almost never wasted, only moved around. Energy is the important input.
I agree that the anti-datacenter hype is not much different than anti-nuclear or anti-vaccine insanity, and uses the same tactics of deception and obfuscation. But there is definitely an impact to pulling too much water out of one place too fast, which must be ethically addressed when building datacenters. Beyond potential impacts to other local residents in terms of reduced access to local water or price increases t…
If you're talking about the New York Times Article "Their Water Taps Ran Dry When Meta Built Next Door" described in https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake , that NYT article was so misleading I'd call it basically a deliberate lie. The article was about a household that used well water and started having more problems with sediment in their well water when Meta started constructing a data center within a mile of them (that was not operating yet because it wasn't done being built yet). It's unclear if the construction of the data center was actually related to their sediment issues, and even if it was, the fact that it was a data center being constructed as opposed to some other type of large building was irrelevant.