You'd have to look locally at individual datacenter projects then and not be against all of them.
If it's really the case that a local municipality grants a new datacenter to be built that already has a stressed water supply, the people in the area should complain, and if nothing is done then we can be mad at just that ONE datacenter/company. Not the entire industry.
But I just don't see that happening. Noone is going without water because of datacenters. Noone is going without water other than people in California who get there's stolen from farms. That's a real issue, not a hypothetical.
Though you can also be mad at the industry as a whole, an industry where leaders scream as loud as possible how they will make your life worse. I think it’s perfectly justified. And DCs are a perfect fit for that, you have a huge ominous monolith to point at that nobody wants to have around them
> Though you can also be mad at the industry as a whole, an industry where leaders scream as loud as possible how they will make your life worse. I think it’s perfectly justified. And DCs are a perfect fit for that, you have a huge ominous monolith to point at that nobody wants to have around them
This is exactly my problem. I'm not saying you're wrong about this in any way. But your (and many others) core problem with datacenters is not actually the water use. The water argument is just a strawman to increase environmental legitimacy, and thats a really bad and harmful practice (I do realize that this might seem minor given incompetent political leadership that spews uninformed drivel all day, but coherency and correctness still matter!)
The water argument is simply never helpful. If water is scarce locally, then let local administration reject datacenter projects for exactly that reason. If they fail to do that, fix/campaign against the local administration (because that's where the problem is at). But blanket arguing against datacenter buildout because of water usage is just bad-faith campaigning, and it is gonna hurt credibility elsewhere.
If it's really the case that a local municipality grants a new datacenter to be built that already has a stressed water supply, the people in the area should complain, and if nothing is done then we can be mad at just that ONE datacenter/company. Not the entire industry.
But I just don't see that happening. Noone is going without water because of datacenters. Noone is going without water other than people in California who get there's stolen from farms. That's a real issue, not a hypothetical.