>I suspect that the heated debate and protests around wateruse from datacentres is intentional misdirection by big tech companies to shunt environmental thought/discussion to a managed topic instead of the one they don't want to talk about and can't avoid which is carbon emissions.

Is there any evidence of this? If anything they're pretty vocal at refuting that. Otherwise it just sounds like "everyone more radical than me are false flag industry shills to make the movement look bad, and everyone less radical than me are industry plants trying to water legislation down".