> We can also think about it in economic terms. The 2.5 billion gallons per day required to grow cotton in the US created about six billion pounds of cotton in 2023, worth around $4.5 billion. Data centers, by contrast, are critical infrastructure for technology companies worth many trillions of dollars. Anthropic alone, just one of many AI companies, is already making $5 billion dollars every year selling access to its AI model. A gallon of water used to cool a data center is creating thousands of times more value than if that gallon were used to water a cotton plant.

Clothing is a basic human need, whereas data centres or AI are, well, not.

To reduce this to purely "economical value" is bizarre. This is "only madmen and economists believe in infinite growth" type stuff.

As for the rest, one of the concerns is that it adds demand to an already stressed system that struggle to meet the other needs – many of which are far more critical – especially during droughts. The proverbial straw that overflowed the bucket, so to speak. Stuff like "it's 6% of the water used by US golf courses" is far too broad because in some areas there are no water shortage problems and in others there are.