And when the heat is the same amount as a power plant or more? Do you know how those work?

like a lake

what happens to water when it's heated?

Do you think that AI doesn't use data centers? What do you think that the huge surge in building data centers is for?

Literally at the top of the article I linked:

With larger and new AI-focused data centers, water consumption is increasing alongside energy usage and carbon emissions.

Also from the article:

A medium-sized data center can consume up to roughly 110 million gallons of water per year for cooling purposes, equivalent to the annual water usage of approximately 1,000 households. Larger data centers can each “drink” up to 5 million gallons per day, or about 1.8 billion annually, usage equivalent to a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people.

And worse:

Data center water usage closely parallels energy usage and carbon emissions. As data centers use more energy for their typical data center operations and to meet AI requests, they consume larger amounts of water to cool their processor chips, so as to avoid overheating and potential damage. Similarly, as energy use increases in data centers, so do carbon emissions.

So, no, it's very much not only about the power for the data centers, although that is one component. And it's fantastic that you live in an area with renewable hydro power, but that doesn't help data centers built in areas that aren't served by renewables.

The same place where every other form of water consumption goes: to the water cycle.

If your argument is "that evaporated water will just rain again" then you're arguing that water consumption is not real, and people should not care about wasting water.

That is not true. Most of the water of the water cycle is in the ocean. When you consume water, you are turning 100% high value fresh water into mostly low value salt water.