Why aren’t the data centres just honest about their water usage if it’s seemingly so low?
Companies might want to avoid this being used as a side channel to infer the amount of their compute.
Companies might want to avoid setting a precedent where activists can demand such information.
Companies might want to avoid the effort of publishing this data, or the risk of publishing incorrect data.
none of these are reason for the country not to demand transparent data for monitoring.
Being able to monitor things properly has high societal value - it prevents fraud (more data being visible makes it harder to fake). It prevents skirting regulations, and makes it easier for competitors to sniff out high margin opportunities (which serves to break monopolies in some sense).
Not to mention that statistics collected could have value in aggregate in research sometime in the future.
Like auditing and accounting, the country should mandate transparent data reporting of utilities usage for all industries.
So by ignoring the other 33 higher users and just focusing on DCs, what are we actually trying to accomplish?
I was replying to "Why aren’t the data centres just honest about their water usage if it’s seemingly so low?".
Facts & reason do nothing to a moral panic.