I’ve heard on various sites that data centers use a lot of water, but where does it go? Simply using water for cooling purposes doesn’t necessarily mean it’s “ used”. Now if there are cooling towers, they cool via evaporation so it’s definitely getting consumed. If they use chillers the water just runs in a loop.
We used river water in our cooling towers in the chemical plant I worked in. They filter it a little but it’s definitely not potable water and we had a lot of issues with equipment scaling.