Water used for evaporative cooling is, at least locally, consumed in the process as it ends up in the air as water vapor; evaporative cooling is the most common way that water is used for cooling. Eventually of course that water will return to the surface as rain. But that can easily happen thousands of kilometers away, effectively removing it from the local environment.

This is quite different from other industrial uses of water, eg cleaning, where the vast majority of the water ends up in a treatment plant and is discharged again back to local rivers. Though even then, if you're sourcing the water from underground wells, depending on the geology you may be using up a limited resource.

The water thing is the least legitimate argument of all the resource arguments. I don't find the electricity argument compelling considering the technological advancements either but at least I get where they are coming from. Not so much with water. Datacenters reuse their water and if they still waste a lot of water through exchanges in regular maintenance... it's still only a matter of time until the facility ups their treatment standards to match state of the art efficiency.

Yea it's enviro fud appealing to nimby'sm

Reality is when this infrastructure is built its a supply-side effect that lowers costs to residents, also comes with less costs on local fire/police etc since the space and other infrastructure isn't going towards increased housing density

There's a very strange agenda trying to prevent infrastructure from being built in america, from shuddered pipeline projects to canceled hydro ingress, there's some big interests that don't want the American economy to prosper by producing real infrastructure.

These arguments make my brain hurt.

What else would have been a better use of that energy than what the person paying for it is using it for?