I want to understand if we're really comparing apples to apples. What does 'consumption' mean in these contexts? How much of the water returns to the local water table vs evaporation vs becomes waste water?
Even if you use such an extremely conservative ratio (and assume that all water used in datacenters is 100% evaporated away for cooling) the argument stands.
In datacenters the water "consumed" is returned with a whole bunch of...water.