I've wondered this for a while, why does AI use so much water? Are companies just sending the output of their liquid cooling into the drain? Most computers I've seen use a closed loop and consume no water past the original filling up
basically yes. Closed loop systems require more energy and are more expensive investments. The main concern for data centers is Total Energy / Energy Compute.
There was a good talk about this at 37C3 https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11796-energy_consumption_of_data...
All that irrigation water pumped out of the ground in the southwest falls back as rain too. While the land subsides, plants can no longer reach water, and towns have to build deeper wells.
In an ideal world, all these data centers would instead intake salt water from the ocean, use their energy to evaporate it and condense it, producing fresh water and salts as output.
People think water is scarce, but there are still parts of the world where water is abundant, where flooding is more of a concern than fresh water scarcity.
Combine with Quebec's cheap electricity, and it seems an ideal place to site data centers.