Because in most cases it kind of is. It's not that the H2O molecules are forcefully disintegrated, but most data centers use evaporative cooling, meaning that whatever water is fed to the datacenter through the municipal water system ends up as moisture in the atmosphere. This is in effect equivalent to a sizable leak in the water infrastructure.
Yes, but you can neither drink rainwater nor use it to cool a data center. And the rain may end up falling thousands of miles away. Excessive use of water reduces flow in natural bodies of water and can mess up local ecosystems.
Not sure I'd drink most river water either, and I would hope most data centers don't pull water straight from the aquifer (though maybe they do). Fair points though.
I'd guess that you're not from somewhere that water is scarce. In the American West there's not really a lot of water. I won't turn this into a multi paragraph lecture, but I'll give a few bullet points to give you a sense of what it's like:
- There's an entirely different legal framework around how water from rivers is allocated. The "normal" flow of the most important river, the Colorado River, was calculated during a time of unusually high flow, so there's a lot of tension between different states about whether they're getting their fair share.
- To give you a sense of how "thirsty" the west is, the Colorado River rarely reaches the ocean anymore.
- groundwater use is generally much less regulated, which is causing issues like the Oglala aquifer to drop at an alarming rate. Many aquifers are damaged if they're overpumped, because the weight of the ground above them will crush empty spaces.
- bad actors in the groundwater space can lower the water table and make other peoples' wells run dry
- this is made more complicated by the fact that surface water and ground water interact with each other. Reducing stream flow can affect groundwater, and using groundwater can affect streamflow.
If you want an approachable and entertaining introduction to some western water issues (including the backstabbing and plotting that inspired Chinatown!), I'd suggest reading Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.
Surely all uses of water are part of the closed-loop water cycle? Other than launching it into space for astronauts to drink, and using it in permanent reactions like concrete hydration?
Drinking water, spraying it on crops, using it to clean a car, or using it to flush a toilet all end up with the water evaporating, or making its way to the ocean and evaporating from there.
Ultimately, if a river provides a certain number of acre-feet of fresh water, evaporating it to cool a data centre uses it just as much as to evaporating it to grow alfalfa in a desert, except perhaps more usefully.
Fresh water isn't meaningfully a closed loop. We are draining fresh water aquifers, causing the land above them to sink downwards eliminating the voids where fresh water was stored, and moving the formerly fresh water into the ocean where it is no longer drinkable, usable for growing crops, or for most industrial purposes.
We do get new fresh water at a reasonable pace thanks to rain - but in many parts of the world we are using it faster than that, and not just depleting the stored volume of fresh water but destroying the storage "containers" themselves.
