[moooo99]

> In addition, water is almost never wasted, only moved around.

You can literally day the same thing about energy. Electricity is never wasted, its just different afterwards.

Water use absolutely does matter, because „being moved around“ in the quantities we do, is far from trivial. Its also different than agriculture. Agriculture still has a somewhat closed local water cycle while the water used for evaporative cooling is basically gone locally.

It matters a whole lot for where you are. If you‘d do evaporative cooling with salt water from the ocean, nobody would bat an eye. The problem is that it is done with fresh water, which is becoming increasingly scarce in an increasing number of regions around the world.

[dominicq]

In an increasing number of regions, yes, but not where AWS data centers are located. People are not dying of thirst because of us-east-1. The one has nothing to do with the other.

[tptacek]

You have to know this isn't a valid comparison. When people say the water isn't lost to cooling, they literally mean the water ends up back in the water table --- on a human time scale. When you burn fuel to generate electricity, you don't get the fuel back.