The environmental impact of water usage seems way overblown to me.

Last year, U.S. data centers consumed 17 billion gallons of water. Which sounds like a lot, but the US as a whole uses 300 billion gallons of water every day. Water is not a scarce resource in much of the country.

To be clear all talk of water usage has been focusing on local usage which isn't well represented by national numbers.

Yeah. There are metrics for how water stressed a community is. We know where data centers have been built, and we know how these water metrics have changed over time.

The correct metric is something like, what's the probability that the launch of data center in a location results in nearby communities to drop significantly in these water metrics.

Personally, I agree. That said, I think it might be worth considering the impact of water usage in local areas that are relatively water constrained.

It seems like a very minor problem next to the huge super obvious one, electricity use.

Google almost certainly uses evaporative cooling towers, it’s almost twice as efficient as air cooled chillers by themselves.

Google uses plenty of water in cooling towers and chillers. Sure, water cooling loops to the server may reduce the amount a little bit compared to fans, but this isn't "recycling" in any normal sense.

It's mostly a play for density.