By day, Andy Masley was working as a director for an effective altruism community in DC. By night, he was writing blogs for his Substack The Weird Turn Pro, such as: “A failure to take violence seriously is bad.”

But last January, Andy noticed something curious. When he’d passively mention using ChatGPT at parties, people would respond: “Don’t you know how bad that is for the climate?”

“And I would try to suss out what they meant by that,” Andy told us in an interview.

Using Claude, some back-of-the-napkin math, a guiding desire for things to make sense, and his background as a high school physics teacher (“explaining how much a watt hour is turns out to be really useful,” he told us), Andy identified a concerning pattern: the country’s top papers, from Bloomberg to The Washington Post, were stoking fears with almost certainly wrong or woefully misleading statistics about data centers’ water use.

So he wrote about it — at length. In these dispatches, which are definitely not designed for the modern attention span, Andy defines terms, aggregates data in charts, and walks people through his math and general thought process for tens of pages at a time. He didn’t expect the essays to blow up. Mainly, he just wanted the writing on-hand when people got mad at him at parties. But maybe because the message is so contrarian — data centers are not taking all the water, they’re not projected to, and sometimes they’re actually improving water access — his Substack has gone gangbusters (he’s up to 5,200 subscribers from roughly 0). Just in the last few weeks, he’s exposed major errors in a leading book on the subject, earned the nickname “AI water guy” in the Pirate Wires Slack channel, made his case on The New York Times’ tech podcast (a lesser accomplishment, to be sure), and pretty much single-handedly started a national conversation on AI water doomerism.

But how could Andy’s thesis possibly be true, given the coverage?