A lot of those environmental claims are not accurate, or substantially overblown.

Heavy metals in the water table is a new one I haven't heard before, and I'm skeptical.

Most of this is motivated reasoning by people who don't like AI for other reasons and are just looking for justifications to shut it down.

Although there is some irrational hysteria about the whole "chatgpt is drinking all our water" thing, to me the biggest issue (other than the mass piracy) is local energy bills going up without contributing to the local economy. Seems like it would do more harm than good for all but the owners of the datacenters.