Each datacenter uses as much water as 1,000 homes. You're welcome to put such resource constraints in your own local community if you don't care about the increased demand.
A couple of dozen planned data centers, with an estimated combined use of 160k gallons per day.
Apparently the average household uses 300 gallons a day, which seems insane to me. I guess a lot of people water their lawns. That gets us to a mere 23 households per data center. Even with 100 gallons per day per household or less, the local data centers are not at 1000 households per data center.
And where I live, water is not a concern. They are building a pipe out from Lake Michigan, which has been in the works now for 10 years. That primarily gets the tri-city area off of the aquifers which have been drained at an unsustainable rate for the last 100 years.
If I lived along the Colorado river system, that's a different discussion.
That's nuts. These practices took so much water that native populations could no longer sustain themselves from the river. Complaints about the relatively low use of water by data centers seems pretty weak in comparison, although I still wouldn't locate them in the desert; the desert is a better place to load up with solar and wind farms.
https://coloradoriverscience.org/Water_law_and_policy if you're interested.
Totally agree, and that's part of why I was bringing it up. I recently was going down the rabbit hole of the story of the Salton Sea. Absolutely insane.
As far as I know, there's not a single place in the world where someone went without water to cook, drink, or bathe because a data center consumed it.