They’ve made this claim numerous times in the article and I really don’t understand it. The building has tons of water being recirculated through it. That water came from somewhere in the surrounding natural world. How is that 0 water consumption?
But it's still misleading. The major source of water use in datacenters, by _far_, is the water used in power generation. This improves PUE, which reduces power draw, but the savings are almost certainly under about 20% given that many modern datacenters already operate at a PUE of under 1.2. So if you're running on coal or gas, you're still consuming quite a bit of water indirectly.
Now that said again - the water consumption part of this equation is generally overhyped. The power draw is the problem, as are the really bad temporary hacks to the power problem (e.g., what x.ai is doing with "temporary" gas turbines).
A PUE of 1.2 means that for every watt of power you're using in a server, you're using 1.2 watts drawn from the grid (approximately). Those extra 0.2 watts are being spent on cooling and other things.
Imagine a residential building that reclaims and reprocesses and purifies 100% of all the water it uses. This would be dramatically more difficult and better than the status quo, and would be called 'net zero' by any sensible accounting method.
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Obviously, evaporative cooling is net-zero water use when accounted across the entire globe (the water falls as rain, somewhere, eventually), but it is net-negative for a local community.