> massive amounts of electricity and water ... we need to succeed on all fronts

Datacenters' used for training or batch jobs can be placed in places where water and power are plentiful, ambient temperature are relatively low and government/society are stable.

A datacenter is going to be built at the bottom of New Zealand where all these things are true. There must be plenty of places in the world where this holds true.

At least for training, I think it is possible to have our cake and eat it. For real-time inference, probably not.