What does this mean?
a) datacenters don't use water for computation, they use it for cooling
b) the water isn't obliterated, it's still there
c) the water can be recycled and rereleased into the ecosystem, which it mostly is.
Chile is a good place, if you look at the submarine cable map (which allows connections over the internet between regions) you'll see that in the west part of South America, Chile is the only country with a submarine cable that goes to Asia, and is going to be working in 2028 and Chile in general over land also has a very good internet connection and is very advanced technologically.
I like the initiative as a life-affirming activity, but spreading falsehoods about water usage is not a good thing. Lying and deceiving makes the world a worse place. This sentence could just as easily read:
""BECAUSE OF [Quili], COUPLED WITH AN ONGOING CLIMATE CRISIS, CHILE IS FACING A SEVERE DROUGHT EXPECTED TO LAST UNTIL 2040."
Without explaining what proportion of the drought comes from the climate crisis, or the mechanism by which data centers cause drought, you could substitute almost anything for [Quili] here.
The water hype needs to go. It's caught on with people who get their news off tiktok, but we need to have better epistemic models if we want to actually make the world a better place.
Why focus on epistemic models instead of ethical ones?
In real life, in Chile, who "stole all the water" ? How did they "steal" the water?
It seems the villain here could be the Chilean government, for prioritizing the tech economy over the people at a time when it matters most.