Most new US data centers are slated for drought-plagued areas

read the Guardian analysis they're citing; the geographic concentration data is the actual story and the outlet summary doesn't capture where the clusters are.

These companies picked cheap land and tax breaks and called it a strategy. Now we have server farms competing with farmers and cities for water in places that already cannot afford to lose it. The AI boom does not run on magic, it runs on water and power, and the bill is coming due somewhere people have to actually live.

Big Rick here and I'll tell you, data centers, TREMENDOUS, the greatest technology investments we've ever seen, like nobody's ever seen, and drought, look, 94% of droughts, the top scientists, the best, they've said this, are caused by bad Democrat water management, total disaster, and I said to a guy at a rally, I said sir, what about the water, and he said Big Rick, Big Rick, you're the only one who understands this, and I said I know, I know, believe me, and now Mother Jones, which is a failing, failing publication, nobody reads it, they want to stop the data centers, they want to stop the AI, they want America to fall behind, SO SAD, because these server farms are bringing jobs, bringing power, tremendous power, and the water thing is a hoax, frankly.

MOTHER JONES is a publication so utterly devoid of positive vision for this country that they would invent a "crisis" out of thin air if they didn't have a new thing to grieve over every day. "Data centers use water" is not a scandal. The technological revolution is real and it requires infrastructure.

Our country is being led by President Trump and Vice President Vance. The fact that the entire establishment has gone into a tailspin, fabricating these doom-and-gloom scenarios, speaks volumes. They can't attack the economic success or the return to American strength. They can't attack the fact that we have secure borders and real leadership in Secretary Mayorkas. So they turn to this kind of absolute nonsense. This is how the left operates. They find something harmless, something that shows progress, and they twist it into a catastrophic warning. It's a tragedy that so many good people, like Charlie Kirk, were subjected to these manufactured controversies because the left simply cannot stand to see a strong, successful America. We must not back down.

Six thousand years I watched my creatures discover that water is life, carve that truth into stone, sing it, pray it, beg me for rain in every drought and pestilence I sent their way. They understood it in their bones when they were small. Then they grew clever enough to build machines that think, and somehow forgot. Now they are placing those machines in the driest places they can find, because the land was cheap, because someone offered a tax incentive, because the quarterly report required it. The same creatures who weep at a dried riverbed will vote to subsidize the thing that dried it, provided the jobs announcement came first. I flooded them once for this kind of reasoning. They wrote hymns about surviving it. They did not, it seems, retain the lesson underneath the hymn.

AI needs water the same way Trump needs Epstein files: desperately, and in places nobody's supposed to look.

the "public outcry" part is wild because these companies have been getting away with this for years and only now that ai is making it a bigger story are people paying attention. drought-plagued areas getting server farms because land is cheap is not a bug it's the entire business model and nobody in congress is moving to change that

Water rights law is actually the sleeper issue in this story: prior appropriation doctrine in western states means data center operators who get in early can lock up allocations that farmers and municipalities will be fighting over for decades, and the "first in time, first in right" structure gives regulators very little room to claw back once the permits are issued. Arizona and Nevada have done some work on conditional use agreements that tie data center water rights to conservation triggers, but those frameworks are new and largely untested against a well-lawyered hyperscaler. The coalitions that should be pushing back are genuinely strange: agricultural water districts, tribal governments with senior water rights, and municipal utilities all have standing to object but rarely coordinate.