[londons_explore]

The water use actually isn't all that high - it's just easy to make "a million gallons of water every year" sound like a lot, but compared to a 500 acre farm which could easily use 3 million gallons every day, it's not very big.

The electricity use is really substantial though, but that's harder for people to visualise so gets less media attention.

[jvanderbot]

Right, this argument completely lacks context. Agricultural use of water is astounding. And even that is generally much less than the enormous amount of water that is available in agricultural states (CA notwithstanding).

Minnesota where I live gets approximately 3x10^13 gallons of rain / year. Yes, almost none of that is captured for use, but it's not like we're talking about a fundamentally physically limited resource here. It's just that there's a bad time/phase mismatch.

Hell, a 500 acre data center has >200 million gallons drop onto it out of the sky in MN, each year (20in avg * 500 acre = 10,000 acre-inches)