Rhett Larson, a professor of water law and an environmental law expert at Arizona State University, argued that Canada should treat water as it treats gold or oil. Larson acknowledges that water is unique among natural resources “because of its esthetic, cultural and ecological significance, as well as being essential to all life on earth.”

“They're world leaders in chips, and they want to be world leaders in all these other things,” said Paul Westerhoff, an ASU professor and Fulton Chair of Environmental Engineering who has worked for more than a decade with the semiconductor industry. He leads a dozen scientists in research for semiconductor water treatment. “What we're trying to do is to figure out how they can take that wastewater, clean it up and make new chips again with it.”

According to a statement from the research director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy Kathryn Sorensen, “Groundwater across the state is a hugely valuable supply, there isn’t enough water for everything, right? Human wants are always unlimited. Our ability to meet those wants is always somewhat limited. I hope you think of these trade-offs in terms of which developments are worth the water.”

“Everybody’s running for reelection,” said Kathleen Ferris, who crafted some of the state’s landmark water legislation and now teaches water policy at Arizona State University. “Nobody wants to sit around the table and try to deal with these issues.”

"This is long overdue, but better now than never," said Kathleen Ferris, a senior research fellow at Arizona State University's Kyl Center for Water Policy, who previously directed the Arizona Department of Water Resources when the state's groundwater laws were passed in 1980. "It is really important that the Department of Water Resources takes these actions because we need to protect these groundwater supplies."

Margaret Garcia, an assistant professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University, said the billion-dollar disaster dataset does not capture all the ways global warming impacts the economy because it includes only the most expensive disasters caused by a subset of extreme events.

Some of the data centers use a lot of water that is increasingly scarce in Arizona. As Sarah Porter, Director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy, pointed out to me, citing another person's research: In Arizona, each demand for an answer from a generative AI tool like ChatGPT consumes 2 1/4 tablespoons of water for cooling the centers.

“Sometimes I feel like people don’t want to do the heavy lifting,” said Kathleen Ferris, who is now a water policy researcher at Arizona State University. “Instead, they want to just find the next water supply and be done with it and have somebody else pay for it.”

"Atmospheric water harvesting systems can be an 'important tool' for disaster response when water supplies might be offline for an extended period of time," says Paul Westerhoff at Arizona State University, and are well-suited for places with relatively high humidity like Florida. However, he says their reliance on electricity, often from a generator, has been an issue during past disasters.