I love the car analogy

By the way, I'd be really interested to see this same calculation but on a per-unit-area basis. This might show how data centers have the potential to create very acute problems for specific water resources...

There are areas in the world (not the Great Lakes region) that are already really struggling with water availability due to the combination of climate change and population growth (and some geopolitics as well), and putting data centers there is really irresponsible.

However, I feel like the issue posed by data centers is not really best viewed in the global context, but rather in the local one. It's where they're being built - in areaS that are already water stressed - that's the problem.

You're on the right track. The "consumptive water use" of agriculture, as we call it, can be quite high, and approaches 100% of withdrawals in arid areas. We consistently undervalue our water across all industries.

Hydrologists face an incredibly difficult task: communicating statistics about streamflow that defy both intuition and the lived memory of a community. But helping people understand that risk (even when it's invisible) might be our most important job.

Properly managing the floodplain is a societal good, not an example of government overreach. The single most effective way to keep people out of the way of a flood is to keep them out of the floodplain.