A few do. You draw in cold water from the depth of a lake or fjord and pass that through a heat exchanger before dumping it back in the reservoir. It’s more common in power plants. There’s only so many places where the geography works out for this though.
Funnily enough, if you actually look into the source of these data center water consumption memes, they typically count that circulated water as “consumed” by the data center despite the fact that, you know, it doesn’t actually go anywhere.





Guys, you can laugh at a joke. The AI doesn’t win just because someone upvoted a meme. Maintainability of codebases has been a joke for longer than LLMs have been around because there’s a lot of truth to it.
Even the most well intentioned design has weaknesses that we didn’t see coming. Some of its abstractions are wrong. There are changes to the requirements and feature set that they didn’t anticipate. They over engineered other parts that make them more difficult to navigate for no maintainability gain. That’s ok. Perfectly maintainable code requires us to be psychics and none of us are.