Case in point, Microsoft’s water use shot up from 6.4 million cubic meters in 2022 to 7.8 in 2023, in large part due to the “construction of more data centers.”

By way of comparison, the California almond industry uses 3.5 billion cubic meters of water per year. Describing datacenters as using “astronomical amounts of water” is a plain and simple lie.

Moreover, datacenters can be cooled with water that’s not suitable for most other uses. Google’s Finland datacenter is cooled with seawater, for example.