[bearbin]

For datacentres that require air conditioning as opposed to natural ventilation (most of them) a very popular approach is to use evaporative cooling towers [1] in combination with W2W chiller units [2]. The chillers cool the internal water circuit and heat the external water circuit, the excess heat is dumped to the environment by evaporating water in the cooling towers.

Of course it's possible to use air-cooled equipment and this is more common in cooler climates or smaller data centres, so it's not a rule of nature that cooling servers wastes water but it's certainly a very common outcome.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiller