You have an analogue in weapons design, as this is one of the big reasons we haven't seen caseless ammunition. The case - in addition to providing a hot seal for the high pressure gas - also is an absolutely amazing heat sink, ejecting all that thermal mass right out the top of the weapon. Caseless ammo, the breech, barrel, bolt . . honestly, the wholy weapon - gets real hot real fast, exacerbated by the fact that now, with no case, everything has to have tight seals.
My understanding is that a closed cooling tower uses more energy because evaporation is so much better than radiation at removing heat.
2) Electricity is much more portable than water. Droughts are regional and there's little that can be done about it (other than avoiding waste), but electricity can be and often is transferred from out of state. And we do have a lot of solar+wind power nowadays, should be a good fit for cooling.
https://datacenters.microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05...
Millions of gallons of consumption and brine sewage is not a trivial problem for places that are rural.
When I buy water it has sewer charges by default, which means if I concentrated that to seawater level they'd be getting 100x or 200x payments to process it, and even higher for brine.
It's possible to meter the sewer separately, but there are extra charges for water with too much biochemical oxygen demand or suspended solids. Throw an extreme salinity charge on there so they can pay for full treatment and then some.
Is there a reason to have datacenters directly fund facility upgrades?
But the real take away is don't let the black journalism scare you. using water for an evaporation cooling system is about the least bad thing you can do with it.