But following that argument wouldn’t you want to shut down the big water consumers? There are many things using more water than AI data centres.

Not sure how to correctly link comments across instances on lemmy, but I went way too deep into this in another comment here https://slrpnk.net/comment/23703343

Tl;dr for this specific case: (animal) agriculture is the main reason the aquifers in USA are drying out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer#Accelerated_decline_in_aquifer_storage