The nonsense about 'using all the water' and datacenter protests has to be a Chinese psyop. It's so fantastically stupid to protest someone taking an empty field and paying local taxes on it and employing dozens of highly paid people in the middle of nowhere. There's literally no downside. There is effectively no pollution. There are jobs for every level of education, from security guard to the people installing hardware. There's no toxic runoff, no danger of a chemical explosion, and no carcinogens being dumped. This is the only rural industry you can say that about.

Water is a renewable resource. I know you folks in California can't comprehend this, but in the parts of the country where it actually makes sense for humans to live water just falls from the sky multiple times per week. We get so much water the problem is making sure we get rid of it safely, we don't have to fight over who has the most senior claim to it or decide whether we want to have endangered species or almonds more. Our streams don't run dry 4/5 of the year. We don't have to check about water restrictions when we water our lawns because there are never water restrictions and we never have to water our lawns.

There are entire areas miles across in this country where if you drive through it you might throw up from the smell. The ponds full of animal feces make the air un-breathable. Where is the protest over that? You realize that this literally does ruin ground water and poisons surface water? Where are the people coming out to say they have to live 4 miles from oceans of pig feces and when the wind blows their way they can't go outside? Yet the media is able to find the 4 people on earth that want to say a building full of computers is 'loud' and that computers use lots of water? When was the last time you filled the water tank on your computer? Yet people are very quick to believe that somehow a warehouse with a bunch of computers in it somehow destroys water?

When did datacenters start using up all the water? Nobody seemed to worry about this until the US and China were fighting for AI dominance, then suddenly datacenters use water and are so loud people go insane from them. What is the first time someone mentioned datacenters using water and causing pollution?

It's absolute group psychosis. Are you actually so dumb that you don't notice that a thing that has been around for 50 years suddenly is a threat to our survival? Were you born yesterday so you don't remember 2 years ago when nobody had ever realized the existential threat of building datacenters in America? Why didn't anyone notice that datacenters were pumping the wells dry in 2021? Maybe they weren't and still arent...