Chinese propaganda efforts are impressive.
This article alone:
1. pushes the lie that data systems are water hogs. (They aren’t; they are closed loop like the radiator in your car.)
2. Pushes the idea they suck up electricity. (They don’t; they have redundant electrical provision and generally build their own power source that makes the grid stronger with more redundancy.
Mark Twain observed it’s harder to convince someone they’ve been defrauded than to defraud in the first place. This hysteria proves Twain right yet again.
Or do what I do. If an old stupid leftist like Willie Nelson is against it; then you should probably be for it.
How do you explain away the constant noise?
How closed is closed? How much water does it take to fill that radiator you mention, and how often does it need to be refilled / replaced?
It’s not water usage (actually water warming) or electricity usage that bothers me, it’s what all of this computing is doing to us. How much data center activity is used for poking into our lives.
So why did they raise my electricity rates and say it’s because of data centers? After a while, they flushed that water out into the lakes, which raised the temperature of that lake.
Something that would help their image is the building of their data centers in ways that would be beneficial even if the need for them fades, for instance buildings designed to make it easier to convert them to other uses, permanent and integrated on site energy producing equipment that could augment the electric grid in the future.
They could be sold as not only what they are and their importance for that, but also as bringing additional permanent useful infrastructure to the community not something that was breezing in, taking resources, and then might be vacant and decaying in a few years.
I worked in a Data Center before I retired from Verizon twelve years ago.