Seneca wrote a whole letter to his friend Lucilius titled “On Groundless Fears.” His point, roughly 2,000 years before cable news existed, was that we suffer more often in imagination than in reality, and that most of what torments us never actually arrives. Seneca never saw a data center, but he would recognize this fall's political ad campaigns instantly. Voters in Georgia, Virginia, and a dozen other swing districts are being told that a warehouse full of computers is about to drain their aquifer and double their power bill. The claim is loud, it is bipartisan, and it is mostly wrong.

Start with water, since that is where the scariest numbers travel fastest. A widely made claim held that a single ChatGPT prompt drinks a bottle of water. Google's own measured figure for a typical prompt is about a quarter of a milliliter, roughly five drops. The bottle-sized number came from a 2023 academic estimate that bundled in the water used generations away at a power plant, under assumptions nobody's actual usage matches. At the national level, American data centers directly consumed about 17 billion gallons of water for cooling in 2023, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Agriculture, by USDA's own count, accounts for more than 80 percent of the nation's consumptive freshwater use, dwarfing anything a server farm draws. Add in the water used to generate the electricity data centers draw, and the indirect total climbs to around 211 billion gallons, a real number worth tracking, but still a rounding error next to farms and lawns.

Electricity is where the fear campaign really overreaches. Multiple independent studies, including work from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the nonprofit........

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