Yes, of course I've heard about PFAS before, but not that data centers were polluting public water systems with PFAS, did you mean earlier that you've read stories about PFAS in general in your papers? That'd put your previous comment in another light, I thought you specifically talking about the "more than 11,000 U.S. public water systems alleging PFAS contamination" part, not PFAS' in general.
3M is a huge manufacturer in material sciences, probably best known for adhesives/tape.
They were one of the high-profile sources of PFAS (Dupont is another that springs to mind).
The affected population is global. The "11,000 U.S. public water systems alleging PFAS contamination" is part of that global impact, not something related to datacenters.
They moved away from PFAS due to the lawsuits.
The topic of this article is: One of the things 3M stopped producing was a large piece of the supply chain for the fluid cooling process in datacenters.
Did you read the submission article? Seems they tried to use it for cooling data centers and were running a bunch of experiments, one example:
> Intel ran proof-of-concept data center cooling with Novec 649. The technology worked beautifully. The chemistry underneath it was poisoning groundwater.
"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article."