No they do not. The flow there is already balanced, and lake levels are lower than usual.
New York already added another tap for electric generation about 12ish years ago, and IMHO it has had an effect.
You aren't going to meaningfully drain the lakes to cool chip fabs when the vast majority of that water will simply go back into the lake either directly or via the water cycle. It's not going to run off the land and into a river like with flood irrigation or similarly irresponsible water uses. The entire global chip industry today uses less water than the city of Hong Kong.
Keep repeating the script. Short term profit at the expense of long term stability.
Besides it’s not just the evaporation. The leftover water concentrates a lot of the impurities that already exist in the water, and not all of it ends up in proper treatment facilities, which in turn pollutes the place wherever it ends up being. This is actually a problem in parts of Oregon. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/data-c...
> This is actually a problem in parts of Oregon
The problem in that part of Oregon was preexisting contamination in the drinking water.
"the county’s underground water supply had been tainted with nitrates — a byproduct of chemical fertilizers used by the megafarms and food processing plants where most of his constituents worked."
Discharging a little data center water back into lake Michigan isn't going to make any difference. The entire discharge of ever data center in the world wouldn't register.
At present Michigan-Huron is close to the 100 year average (https://www.glerl.noaa.gov/blog/2025/06/23/great-lakes-water...).
The big contributor is that we've not had particularly wet years overall since 2020.