Since sharing this post, Annie Hardy shared a paper she wrote about Water Security in the Age of Hyperscale Data Centers. You can find that paper here.

For years, artificial intelligence has been described in language that makes it feel weightless. It lives in the cloud, answers through a screen, appears as a chatbot, a copilot, a search result, a synthetic image, or a quiet recommendation embedded inside a workflow. That language is useful, but it also hides something important. AI is not floating above the physical world. It depends on buildings, pipes, substations, transmission lines, cooling systems, backup generators, batteries, chips, water, land, tax agreements, zoning approvals, utility planning, and increasingly vocal communities. The more AI moves from novelty to infrastructure, the more visible those physical dependencies become. The data center is where the supposedly invisible future becomes visible. It is where the cloud touches land. It is where intelligence becomes an infrastructure question.