Water used is a terrible metric. Water is not consumed in the process; many cooling systems are closed loop and even open loop systems just release water into t

Water used is a terrible metric. Water is not consumed in the process; many cooling systems are closed loop and even open loop systems just release water into the environment where it will be renewed. What matters is strain on water infrastructure, but that is wildly variable and can't be compared apples to apples. Like a water cooled data center drawing from an aquifer is a massively different beast than one drawing from a river. Likewise a data center with a dedicated tap is much different than one drawing from the standard municipal system. If datacenters are set up in places that can not support them, that's on the operators of the datacenters themselves, not the users of the compute power. And if datacenters are set up in locations where the resources they need are present but they create an excessive burden on the infrastructure upkeep, that's on the municipality for not appropriately charging them for their usage and/or approving plans without checking their capabilities.