Comment by Lanktion
2 hours ago
It is consumed because they evaporate it away and remove it from the local environment.
They easily could build near heating system or cooling the water down in another probably big facility close by and send it to the city
Evaporated water stays in the water cycle though. It comes back down as rain, and returns to the water sources that were depleted (assuming these data centers are generally not using underground aquifers, which I think is true).
You can't control the water cycle over a datacenter and its water source, it is a global system.