Somewhere along the way, "data centers are draining the planet" became a thing people say with a straight face.

It has the right ingredients — scary number, vague science, a building you can point at and feel something about. The only problem is it doesn't survive contact with a high school chemistry textbook.

Water doesn't disappear when it cools a server rack any more than it disappears off a lake on a hot afternoon. It changes phase, drifts downwind, and comes back as rain about a week later — the same cycle that's been running since before anyone built anything. The actual, defensible concerns — local aquifers, municipal strain, where these facilities get sited — are real and worth real policy attention. They're just not the same concern as "the industry is drinking the oceans," which is the version that gets the clicks.

“The apocalypse appears to have been scheduled before the engineering department was consulted.” (Monday)

What follows is the boring, sourced version: the physics, the regulatory record, and what the industry is actually doing about the legitimate parts of this story — because as it turns out, some of it is already solved and nobody told the headline writers. Read it, check the citations, draw your own conclusions.