Then why are they asking people to stop having showers in cities to power the AI?

Because those communities have not structured their laws/regulations/bylaws to properly capture the true cost of utilities to its consumers and price it accordingly. Users should have fairly low rates up to a certain point, and then higher rates for higher consumption. The higher the consumption should cost exponentially more. Think of “gas guzzler” taxes on inefficient cars. Up to now these water utilities probably haven’t needed to make these changes.

If the water utilities price it appropriately high for the data center provider one of two things will happen:

• the data center provider will not build there and go elsewhere
• the data center provider will switch to a “closed loop” system so they don’t have to use so much water.

The reason DCs don’t do that second one by default is because “open loop” (extremely water hungry) is significantly cheaper to operate.