Measured: every data center in America combined uses about 17 billion gallons a year for direct cooling (DOE / Berkeley Lab). U.S. golf courses use 531 billion — about 30× more (GCSAA/USGA survey). Home lawns: ~3 trillion, nearly 200×. Crop irrigation: ~43 trillion, roughly 2,500×. Data centers are about 0.04% of U.S. irrigation withdrawals. Nobody is protesting the back nine. And per facility, water is a design choice: a 25 MW closed-loop facility runs on ~2,700 gallons a day — nine houses.

The grain of truth: an old-style evaporative facility dropped on a small system without basic water engineering can stress it. That's a permitting checkbox — specify closed-loop or air cooling — not a reason to say no. Even in dry basins, the modern designs make the issue disappear.

Measured: the national evidence runs the opposite direction. EPRI found residential rates would be ~6% higher without the data centers built 2019–2024, and Berkeley Lab found the fastest-growth states generally saw prices fall — because a big, steady, 24/7 customer spreads the grid's fixed costs across more kilowatt-hours and pays demand charges that fund upgrades everyone shares.

And where the grid is tight, the fix already exists: developers increasingly bring their own power. The data center funds or builds its own generation and covers its own demand — it doesn't even need to sell power back to the grid. Its supply costs never touch anyone else's bill, while its fixed-cost payments still flow to the utility. Existing customers keep the contribution without inheriting the load. That's how a data center lowers rates even in a constrained region.

The grain of truth: PJM put concentrated new load on standard tariffs in a supply-short market and bills rose. That's a deal-structure failure — the exact one bring-your-own-power exists to prevent.

Measured: U.S. data centers used 4.4% of the nation's electricity in 2023 (DOE / Berkeley Lab), headed toward 6.7–12% by 2028. That's real growth worth planning for — and it's the best kind of load growth a grid can get: steady, predictable, creditworthy, and paying the demand charges and interconnection costs that finance new substations, transmission, and generation for everyone. Utilities have spent twenty years fighting flat sales; this is the demand that gets things built again.

Measured: a modern facility runs about 45–55 dBA at the property line — quieter than a normal conversation (~60 dBA). Sound drops ~6 dB every time distance doubles, so standard setbacks bring it to suburban nighttime ambient. Virginia's legislative audit measured 40–59 dB even at the facilities that drew complaints — and the complaint cases trace to a zoning failure (facilities permitted within 200 feet of homes), not to the buildings themselves. Setbacks, acoustic enclosures, and modeled noise limits in the permit solve it, and operators routinely accept all three.