Environmental coverage of AI infrastructure has spent two years trading in global aggregates — carbon equivalencies, annualized megawatt-hours, planetary water budgets. The Chicago Sun-Times piece [5] breaks that pattern by naming a specific hydrological system under specific pressure. That move matters institutionally: municipal water utilities in Illinois now have a published, citable threat narrative to bring to zoning boards and permitting processes. The German hyperscaler analysis [4] reinforces the same structural point from a different jurisdiction — when two independent reporting projects converge on resource depletion as the frame in…