Borrowed, used up, or gone

"AI is drinking our water" sounds like one claim. It is at least four, and they need different evidence.

Water can be withdrawn: taken from a river or aquifer and returned, warmer or saltier. It can be consumed: evaporated or built into a product, so the local supply loses it. It can be recirculated: run in a closed loop and used again. Almost none is destroyed. Evaporated water comes back as rain, usually somewhere else, which is exactly why consumption matters locally and barely registers globally.

A cooling tower consumes water by evaporating part of what circulates through it. Evaporation carries a lot of heat: near room temperature, about 1.5 liters fully evaporated rejects one kilowatt-hour of heat. The national average is far lower. LBNL's 2023 totals imply about 0.375 liters per kilowatt-hour (66 billion liters over 176 terawatt-hours), roughly a quarter of the fully evaporative figure, because many sites reject heat with outside air and dry coolers much of the year.

Switching every site to air cooling would cut that on-site number, and raise electricity use. Power plants consume water too: LBNL puts the water behind U.S. data-center electricity at nearly 800 billion liters in 2023, about twelve times the on-site figure. A claim that says "stop using water altogether" is arguing for a trade it has not priced.

None of this makes a new facility on a low reservoir fine. It makes the question specific: what does this site cool with, how much is it permitted to withdraw and expected to consume, and how does that compare with the reservoir's other users? That is the question a ClaimCheck report ends on.

Figures, years, and arithmetic: the complete sample report.