As Europe emerges from record-breaking summer temperatures, and as the US prepares for midterm elections in November, data centers find themselves in the firing line on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the UK, water companies say data centers are using 6.6 million liters of precious public supplies every day; in the US, some voters are blaming rises in their electricity bills on, you’ve guessed it, data centers . Bloomberg has described the data center “backlash” as a “defining midterms issue”.

And so, a narrative has been allowed to develop – that too many data centers are being built, and too quickly, and worst of all in areas where water is scarce. No wonder some communities believe their water needs are being ignored in the name of advancing IT infrastructure to support AI.

In some cases, there has been genuine cause for grievance – in an earlier era, water efficiency was not always a design constraint on data center construction.

But the public debate is now running on figures which range from outdated to plain wrong. Some of the loudest claims overstate the problem by orders of magnitude. Others, including several the industry itself repeats, understate it.