Earlier quoted context omitted.
It uses evaporative cooling. https://thatoregonlife.com/2021/09/google-to-expand-data-cen... Note the picture: The water vapor mist from Data Center cooling towers at night https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/the-dalle... > Water vapor rises above the cooling towers in The Dalles data center in Oregon. These plumes of water vapor create a quiet mist at dusk. That is water that isn't being released back…
Yeah, it looks like some (most?) water is evaporated -- but a significant portion is also returned to the river. I saw elsewhere that google "consumes" around 4x as much water for hydroelectric power generation as they use for cooling. Hydroelectric will return essentially all the water back to the source.
> Google’s data centers are right by the Columbia River. Why can’t the company just get its water out of the river?
> Federal law strictly governs water use from rivers. Anderson says withdrawals from the Columbia generally aren’t permitted.
> There are exceptions in cases where waters users can provide a “bucket for bucket replacement” of any water they pull out, Anderson told a city council meeting in September. In such a case, though, a water user would have to find water to put into the Columbia someplace else to compensate for water being pulled out by the city, or by Google.
So, if Google was to use Columbia river water, condense it, and then return exactly the amount that it took it, there wouldn't be an issue.
Instead, Goole is using water from the aquifer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Plateau_Aquifer_Syste... ) where it is getting depleted:
> Areas where groundwater depletion is a concern are in the Umatilla area, and the Palouse slope. In the Umatilla area, total decline since the 1970s is from 300 ft to 100 ft of water height. Overall, between 1968-2009, mean groundwater decline across the aquifer system was at 1.0 ft/year.
The Dalles is part of the Umatilla syncline (see page 9 https://people.wou.edu/~taylors/g473/gonthier_1985.pdf ).