That's a fairly reductionist take from your side.

Did you even look at the article? I'm not trying to defend AI, but it's currently somewhere between 0.31% (2023) and 0.98% (projected for 2030) of freshwater use in the USA. Animal agriculture is at 40.60%. Plants for immediate human consumption are at 23%.

Combined with the fact, that meat is less efficient in converting farmed area or water to calories (In the USA 72% of calories are provided by plants, the remaining 28% are some form of animal product), this should also give you the answer for "why not go into any of the other water intensive crops we grow in the wrong place", which you asked in this thread.

Put all this together with the rising per capita meat consumption world wide and you see why we have a problem. In the USA most aquifers are drying up, including some very important ones for agriculture. And that problem has existed before data centers sprung up everywhere.

And yes, we could and should change agriculture to reduce water consumption - by reducing animal farming. In the best case getting rid of it. Even with people that can't survive on a plant based diet, which I would expect to be very few, we could reduce animal agriculture to close to 0 compared to our current level.

And this is only talking about the water usage of animal products.

And the best part - it doesn't cost anything. On the contrary, it would be cheaper. It doesn't even require new technologies! Going vegan is degrowth in action.

We don't need to eat dead bodies to survive.

We don't need to accept ai either.

For a 'superior species' we sure are f*cking this all up.

You will live without steak though.

We do need food to survive. We don't need meat though.

[Sorry for the long response. I'm sure you meant well, but this felt like what-aboutism, and then caught my interest. Don't talk to me when I'm crossing streets.]

Do you have a source on the lawn-part? Because it sounds highly unlikely that even the USA is using more water on watering lawns than on farming.

However it turns out it is hard to find data on that, especially since the way different studies attribute water usage differs quite a lot.

https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1441/circ1441.pdf - this one completely separates irrigation and livestock water usage, making livestock using only one percent of water usage (i.e. only the water the animals drink). Also the usage by category in the overview is not consumptive use, but generally used water (they could explain that one a bit better). This causes thermoeletric power to account for 41% water use overall, despite only using 4.31 BGal/day consumptive, whereas irrigation uses 73.2 BGal/day consumptive and is attributed with 37%.

So those numbers are difficult to compare. Turns out water use != water use. However I'd argue, that people would rather agree, that the kind of water "consumed" by growing plants is more permanent than water being "consumed" by cooling power plants, where most of the water is put back into the water cycle.

To get back to your point about lawns, the above study includes watering lawns in domestic usage, which is 1% of all fresh water use in the USA. So even if 100% of that is "consumptive use" and only for lawns, it wouldn't really make a dent if we got rid of it (not saying that lawns are fine, but when comparing it to animal farming, it's negligible). Then again, the irrigation category in the study includes "irrigation of golf courses, parks, nurseries, turf farms, cemeteries, and other self-supplied landscape-watering uses [...] in the estimates", but doesn't specify it further.

The only other numbers I could find on the fly are for golf courses from the USGA which puts golf course water use at roughly 2 BGal/day. That's somewhat putting it into perspective - it's not nothing, but still far less than agriculture.

Are you guys even reading the article? Saying "it's both" when there is a factor of 130 between the two is just disregarding the actual problem.

To say it's both is like giving equal blame to my garden beetroot farm.