Agriculture uses orders of magnitudes more water than data centers. A 50% cut in water use by data centers will have nowhere near the impact of a 5% cut in water use by agriculture. But data centers can generate orders of magnitude more revenue.
Say rain water is leaking into your house from two holes in the roof: one is 1 meter in diameter, the other is 1cm. Any effort you spend plugging the 1cm hole is a distraction from the 1m hole you really need to focus on.
You could make an argument that agriculture is different because we need agricultural products to live. But we don't need those specific products to live (alfalfa, almonds, etc), and they could be grown far more efficiently if water were priced by market rates.
Yes, but we have a whole cohort of people hopping around and screeching about the 1cm hole while basically no one cares about the 1m hole. Distraction.
Yes, just like you can't eat trucks, roads, grocery stores, tractors, combines, crop dusters, grain silos, mills, or the FDA. Any system needs many components, most of which aren't directly consumed by someone.
Because it's not really problematic, in the same way that the pollution from campfires isn't a problem. Sure, there's some theoretical pollution from that, but there's about a billion things on the list above it, and you clearly don't give two shits about any of those. You're on a crusade against campfires, not actually interested in pollution, and thus you can be safely ignored.
Say rain water is leaking into your house from two holes in the roof: one is 1 meter in diameter, the other is 1cm. Any effort you spend plugging the 1cm hole is a distraction from the 1m hole you really need to focus on.
You could make an argument that agriculture is different because we need agricultural products to live. But we don't need those specific products to live (alfalfa, almonds, etc), and they could be grown far more efficiently if water were priced by market rates.