[201984]

This is false. Evaporative cooling systems consume significant amounts of water and do not reuse it. They can't anyway, recondensing the water would release all the heat they removed by evaporating it.

[jeffbee]

You don't have to evaporatively cool a data center. You can make a direct trade between energy efficiency and water consumption.

[201984]

You don't HAVE to, but most of the big ones do.

[mrexroad]

You don’t have to but in hotter climates, especially those with higher energy costs (ca), it’s a lot cheaper to cool evaporatively.