>cost more money

Y'all are fixating on this as if it's the damning element... But it's not "more money," it's "more energy."

Using a sealed cooling loop would preserve water, sure, but you'd be covering more electricity to arbitrate that heat transfer. Electricity has to come from somewhere.

You have no idea what you're talking about. The water is being used for evaporative cooling, and what isn't used is recycled. Other methods for cooling might use less water but would use orders of magnitude more energy - in which case this article would be people complaining about Google's electricity footprint instead of water footprint.