alt Hacker NewsWest of the Mississippi, it is remarkably hard to ban the use of water for any purpose in particular. Unlike in the east, where water is considered a shared resource, and political processes are utilized when it is necessary to decide how to use a limited supply, out west we have the ridiculous notion of "water rights" that come with the land. State and federal governments have very limited power to ban the use of water for X if an entity owns the rights to the water is it using.
I've wondered if one facet of the plans for all the datacenters getting started in the American West isn't to lock in the related water rights, regardless of whether the datacenters are ever fully built or utilized for their original purpose.