Another issue is that you could, in principle, build data centers in places where you don't need to evaporate water to cool them. For example, you could use a closed loop water cooling system and then sink that heat into the air or into a nearby body of water. OVH's datacenter outside Montreal¹ does this, for example. You can also use low carbon energy sources to power the data center (nuclear or hydro are probably the best because their production is reliable and predictable).
Unlike most datacenters, AI datacenters being far away from the user is okay since it takes on the order of seconds to minutes for the code to run and generate a response. So, a few hundred milliseconds of latency is much more tolerable. For this reason, I think that we should pick a small number of ideal locations that have a combination of weather that permits non-sub-ambient cooling and have usable low carbon resources (either hydropower is available and plentiful, or you can build or otherwise access nuclear reactors there), and then put the bulk of this new boom there.
If you pick a place with both population and a cold climate, you could even look into using the data center's waste heat for district heating to get a small new revenue stream and offset some environmental impact.
Unlike most datacenters, AI datacenters being far away from the user is okay since it takes on the order of seconds to minutes for the code to run and generate a response. So, a few hundred milliseconds of latency is much more tolerable. For this reason, I think that we should pick a small number of ideal locations that have a combination of weather that permits non-sub-ambient cooling and have usable low carbon resources (either hydropower is available and plentiful, or you can build or otherwise access nuclear reactors there), and then put the bulk of this new boom there.
If you pick a place with both population and a cold climate, you could even look into using the data center's waste heat for district heating to get a small new revenue stream and offset some environmental impact.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFzirpvTiOo