Comment by emushack
My personal experience with suffering from water scarcity: Taking a loss on a crop of corn because the farm at the front of the ditch took more water than they were supposed to take. That same year, a ditch rider was threatened at gunpoint.
When your own personal livelihood depends on another business playing fair with water, these kinds of stories hit different.
It absolutely is a resource issue. It is also very much also a political issue.
Ag water rights is a really f'ed up issue in the US. It's very tangentially connected to whether there's a data center using up water though.
Besides which there are so many other f'ed up dynamics in the profitability of a commodity crop like corn- Gov't subsidies, gmo/pesticides, ethanol, factory animal farming, etc.