Thinking AI is particularly bad (or even that large) compared to other uses of water, electricity, and land is the real AI psychosis.
I ran some numbers on energy use a while back. In general: if you skip one 20 mile drive, you make up for heavy use of e.g. Claude Code for a week.
So telework one day and you're making up for your AI use.
If AI is using too much water, it means the data centers are not being charged enough for that water. Charge them more and they'll magically discover ways to reduce water consumption.
The Texas natural gas mega-data-center story: that's a political problem. Tax carbon emissions and they'll suddenly realize they can power it better with solar, wind, or nuclear power. I'd also speculate that Texas made gas power a contingency to build it, since fossil fuels own Texas.
That figure represents ~40% of extant grid capacity for the entire country in just a single state.
edit: I'd also add that historically, power generation has accounted for 4% of all water consumption in Texas. The highest recorded load demand on the ERCOT grid, to date, is ~87.5 GW. Scaling generation capacity by 500% is not possible to achieve within a short-term time frame, but even if it were, the water demand of the additional generation sites would completely drain many critical aquifers and result in skyrocketing water rates for citizens of a state already suffering terrible droughts regularly.
My guess is that there’s someone making money for getting DCs permitted. Like the paperwork done.
474 GW of capacity is silly woo woo land. I’m not sure you could get enough chips made to use that in the next 10 years. The cost of fuel or solar/batteries or reactors or gerbils or whatever they plan to use to make that would be bonkers.