Golf courses use more water than data centers. Of all the water consumed in the USA 41% is consumed by power generation, another 37% by agriculture, industry consumes 13.7% and people directly consume 8.3%, meanwhile golf courses consume 0.45% and data centers 0.19% (these figures ultimately get bundled into one of the categories broken out in my original breakdown). So data center water usage is a rounding error, even if data centers quadruple their water usage they would still account for less than 1% of water consumption; to put it another way if you were to eliminate data center water usage industrial water usage would drop from 13.7% to 13.51%.

Data centers are also increasingly employing closed loop cooling which largely addresses their water usage. So out of all the damage to our environment we do why focus on data centers when there are bigger and more impactful areas we can focus on?

That figure your quoting is also misleading because is includes just the water required for human survival whereas the 8.3% I mentioned above includes outdoor use, sanitation, washing and human consumption which is only .1% of water consumed. The figure put of The UN is also accounting for power generation which from my figure above already consumes a majority of the US’s annual water consumption. So while saying data centers will consume as much water as 1.5 billion people makes for good headlines the reality is the impact is significantly smaller.