I have a sneaking suspicion that the talk about the water consumption is a red herring intentionally spread by the PR machines of these companies because it's it reframes the debate around an aspect of the issue that is ultimately irrelevant and distracts from ones that are more important like carbon emissions, pollution, electrical/gas price spikes due to induced scarcity and ultimately how these mega projects have little benefit for the people who will experience all the negative consequences of them.

Meta recently announced that they want to put a ~2.0 gigawatt DC about 70km from where I live. The provincial government played up the ~60 million that Meta would be doing int he area and the ~250 million in annual tax revenue that they would receive but none of the conversation focused on the wasted opportunity of using the heat generated from this facility to in greenhouses that could operate year round in our cold climate.

That frustrates me because the waste heat from that single facility alone could go a long way to bootstrapping a greenhouse industry here that would go a long way to ensuring food sovereignty in the region. But of course sovereignty and self-sufficiency are antithetical to the purpose of this AI infrastructure, our government lacks the foresight or will to maximize returns from these kinds of things, and people collectively lacks the ability to think and talk about these things.

So the best we can do is inconsequential conversation about water usage.