Yeah, but when we account for that scale, and look at resource usage, datacenters aren't topping the charts, or even really getting in the top 5, for anything.

You have people who eat meat at every meal losing their mind over water usage and people who set their AC to 68 panicking over energy usage.

Valid point, but this looks like (roughly) 1 billion to 5 billion in a period of 10 years.

5x in a decade. The way it’s talked about you would think it’s orders of magnitude.

Oh, it's absolutely easy to imagine. That is what should give us pause. We are fantastic at imagining things. We are less fantastic at being reasonable.

Complete tangent, but my impression is that one glass of wine per day is "fine", but you're still statistically better off in a non-trivial way by going down to zero. Not counting the benefits of course.... :)

One thing I never see pushback about: Northern Virginia has the highest density of data centers in the United States. Google tells me there are over 600 data centers in Virginia (that is nuts!). This build-out has been happening for more than 25 years. Until very recently, I have not heard any pushback from people in that area. What am I missing?

It's not so hard to imagine that something which was fine at the old scale may cause issues at the new. At the same time, it's also not so hard to imagine that the new scale still isn't particularly large and that there are about a million more important things to worry about.

The question isn't whether it's possible for something to become problematic past a certain scale. The question is whether data centers are at that point, or will be anytime soon.

The actual facts and figures that are presented in opposition tend to be stripped of the larger context, which makes me skeptical. The graph you linked looks wild, but in a country that spends two trillion dollars per year on all construction, is the jump from $1 billion/month to $4 billion/month very important?

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Your point would stand better without the insincere analogy.