Is this using "need" to only mean "there is no possible alternative in any design"?
Your statement -implies- datacenters don't use water for cooling or, if they do, it isn't enough to cause any problem.
How do you square this with the fact that lots of datacenters DO use water for cooling? Yes, if water was prohibitively expensive businesses would find alternatives - that's what prohibitively expensive means so I'm not adding anything more than a tautology here.
Similarly does your claim that at worst this is a mispricing of water mean that they DO use water and it drives the cost up? Isn't that the point here, that businesses driving up the cost of water is bad for the people that also need (your definition of "need" above) water?
I would think they only need cheap electricity, connectivity and in the case of Mexico, far away from seismic activity.
Your claim is that increasing the price of a basic utility by several hundred percent to prevent a company from using a huge amount of it is a fake problem? That sounds like complete bullshit to me, and I don't even live in a city that's collapsing into the ground due to aquifer overuse.
And there’s no reason you have to charge industrial users of water less than residential users if the real price (meaning the cost to replace that water) is higher than the residential price. 0.6¢/gallon is less than I pay and I live in a wet city. I pay about 2¢/gallon. So for industrial electricity rates of 5-7¢/kWh, A/C is approximately a wash vs using residential water for cooling.
Cool story. But every human needs water, and no data center needs water. Why should every person have to pay more to live just to prevent Amazon from breaking the world for a tiny increase in profits?
Good faith engagement on this topic probably requires thinking for 5 seconds if the objection you raised isn’t easily addressed by common methods already.
Additionally, industrial/industrial-scale-agricultural uses of water are almost always more sensitive to water prices. An incredibly poor population would benefit from the tax revenues and jobs offered by companies moving in.