Notably since all the controversy many data centers are very loud about being closed loop and with significant consideration given to other local impacts as well.
They don't have to, and the vast majority don't.
The lie and moral panic is that all datacenters necessarily waste precious drinking water; it's patently false and used by agitators to push, unwittingly or not, a Chinese Communist Party agenda.
What was nonsense about water use?
The claim never made sense to me either, I can only assume those that regurgitated such claims never worked with HPC or even general datacenters before.
Was recently talking to a (non-technical) friend about this, she was surprised after talking about the "insane water use for AI datacenters" when I responded that open-loop cooling is pretty rare for a datacenter and I've never actually seen it used before, versus closed-loop (or just regular air-based cooling) which has no real noticable water consumption.
Order of magnitude more water is lost from wasted irrigation (e.g. during rain, of fallow fields, sprayed into windy air, etc) than data centers.
2. Datacenters have been shown to reduce utility prices. They provide suppliers with previsible long term demand which allows for cost-effective network and production planning.
But I understand blaming your energy waifu for its own failure is unacceptable for nuclear bros.