For the better part of a year, the AI-water conversation operated at the scale of aggregate injury — tens of billions of gallons, drought warnings spanning continents, aquifer drawdown projections. That scale is real, but it is also politically inert. The New York Times story about Meta's data center and the community whose taps ran dry accomplished something that the accumulated statistics had not: it produced a legible victim at a residential address. The policy argument gains traction not when the numbers grow larger but when the numbers acquire…