Texas Governor Greg Abbott coming out and saying on national TV that tech companies "dug their own graves" on data center construction was a major wake up call[0]. The more research that is done on these developments, the more damning it looks.

People want to compare this to the pre-industrial rail buildouts, and sure there are some parallels, but I'd be curious to know if that period had the widespread political resentment towards to infrastructure construction that we're seeing today. Because I can also envision a scenario in which the capacity just doesn't get built since being pro-data center is becoming a political death sentence. And what happens then?

0: https://www.businessinsider.com/greg-abbott-texas-data-cente...

This study is using water "withdrawal" figures rather than consumptive use. Hydroelectric plants withdraw tons of water, but it goes right back into the river it came from.

Coal and nuclear cooling towers use a lot of fresh water, they try to reuse it but still between 2 to 3.5 billion gallons a year evaporates from each plant. Japanese nuclear plants don't have this problem for example because they are built on the coast and consume water directly from the ocean instead of using fresh water cooling towers.

Just build datacenters right ontop of fracking oil fields like North Dakota

I am not kidding

They have endless cheap or even free power from the months/years of offgassing burning off methane, it can be seen from space

* https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/01/16/169511949/a...

And the water (and air) is already so toxically polluted from the fracking that no-one can live near or drink that water or they will get sick

It's a perfect match, again not kidding

Datacenters only need a few people to run it and they can live in highly filtered rooms like hospitals or cleanrooms, heck with bots+ai they won't even need people to run them eventually

This article would be much more effective by first acknowledging that all datacenters can be built and powered in different ways vaarying by location, climate and availabilty.

Generalizations unfortunately serve the subtle purpose of many people who are pro or anti datacenter, ironically while they use datacenters to write articles and use datacenters to post on social media, as well as consume video and nearly anything else.