Sure the water is still somewhere, but its location is important for future use. US water reservoirs are at problematically low levels already.

> Most data centers are closed loop systems, they circulate the water over and over again.

The linked article talks about >500 million gallons used by one large Google AI datacenter in a year. It's nice that most are closed loop systems, but if it's such a common thing to do then why isn't it done by default with all those AI datacenters? How cheap is water for Google that recirculating it is not a no-brainer?