A massive 330-megawatt artificial intelligence data center proposed in California initially promised it would not draw a single drop of liquid from the shrinking Colorado River. Developers are now walking backward from that commitment and want access to the water anyway. Computing infrastructure at this scale demands enormous thermal management, as air cooling fails when ambient temperatures spike past triple digits, forcing operators to turn to liquid evaporation. A 330-megawatt facility functions as an industrial city built exclusively for silicon chips, consuming electricity on the scale of a small manufacturing town and drinking millions of gallons of water daily to keep processing units from melting down. Evaporation is the fundamental mechanism of cooling towers, and a facility operating continuously loses hundreds of thousands of gallons every single day to evaporation alone. Multiply that consumption across dozens of proposed AI campuses across the American West, and the regional math stops working. Local municipalities already ration supplies for agriculture and residential use, and adding industrial server complexes strains municipal infrastructure to breaking point. The jobs rarely materialize at scale once construction finishes, but the water consumption is permanent.