Or even better: the footprint of doing something like farming corn for ethanol

Nice false dichotomy you got there there, might as well calculate the entire water usage for a a single GPU in the supply chain too. Something tells me one is extremely worse than the other when you account for all the water that's used in a single supply chain for high end electronics, but if you want to plop the measuring stick where ever along the whole pony show that makes you look better people will notice.

Also to compare growing food with the totally optional, not useful in the slightest, LLMs that somehow demand local populaces bend to their will for reasons that never seem to benefit them is just bonkers level of self-blinding when it comes to populations absolutely despising big tech, big tech leadership, and big tech practices.

This mania might finally cause the software industry to become a highly regulated with licenses similar to that of other engineering disciplines due to amount of optional destruction they have decided to unleash upon on the planet in such a short time frame.

Breaking it down this way is a great way to minimize the numbers so that it appears reasonable.

See? Middle-Eastern investors are growing alfalfa in the western desert using legal allotments of water! That is so much worse than what we’re doing! Go after them!

They can both be using an egregious amount of water for silly purposes.

The other part of the water debate is also the pollution different systems create. Many data centres went in with the promise of closed-loop systems but changed half-way through construction and couldn’t be stopped.

I think it’s more complicated than, “they’re wrong, it’s just hype.”