Comment by troyvit

At its simplest, it rains more over the ocean than it does over land, so all that fresh water you evaporated is now salty and useless. If you don't believe me just ask ChatGPT. It'll only cost you a bottle of Evian.

> Obviously, you still shouldn't build datacenters in areas that are locally water-stressed as that will add additional burden to the infrastructure.

The problem is that the areas that are locally water-stressed are also the areas where communities are less cohesive (because they ware water-stressed) and have less power to fight back and are therefore the easiest places to build data centers.

This paper goes into what the consumption looks like and even has ideas about how to temper it: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3724499