Isn't most of the water use by a data center consumed during construction for concrete?
It's very important to think about embodied energy and water in the construction project. Operating the datacenter will definitely use more water if the datacenter uses open loop evaporative cooling.
I’d wager that dividing evaporative water by construction water reaches 5 orders of magnitude over its lifetime.
And so this "leak" could be a way of diverting attention from the issue now. And later when the datacenter comes online no one cares because it's already been "revealed".