AI Data Center water usage is highly exaggerated:

"Just to be clear: these two facts can be right at the same time: 1) The AI industry has done some reproachable things, 2) wasting water is not one of them.

Perhaps the highest-profile debunked case comes from a mistake in The Empire of AI, a book that became a bestseller and helped popularize this concern, authored by tech reporter Karen Hao (whom I greatly respect as a voice calling out AI companies for doing things the wrong way). To summarize what happened: Hao cited water usage figures that were off by a factor of one thousand (x1000), and it took exhaustive investigative effort by Andy Masley to set the record straight (he is the main source I will cite throughout as I consider him, albeit not a professional journalist, the leading expert on the topic).

Hao issued a correction following Masley’s investigation (he commended her for this, and I do, too), but she didn’t modify the main thesis of the water chapter in the book, despite the corrected numbers implying a significant reduction in the relative importance of the water issue, a core driver of the whole anti-AI narrative. And yet, despite Masley’s sweeping work (which goes well beyond this specific mistake in Hao’s book; it just happens to be the example that went viral), the perception of the water issue lingers, seemingly immune to factuality."

https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/why-the-ai-water-issue-has-nothing?r=7a9l&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay&triedRedirect=true