As I noted earlier this year, water needs for European AI data centers was negligible at best considering population and overall water usage.
Andy Masley comes to the same conclusion in his recent post, The AI water issue is fake. (Also, three cheers for accurate and descriptive article titles):
All U.S. data centers (which mostly support the internet, not AI) used 200–250 million gallons of freshwater daily in 2023. The U.S. consumes approximately 132 billion gallons of freshwater daily. The U.S. circulates a lot more water day to day, but to be extra conservative I’ll stick to this measure of its consumptive use, see here for a breakdown of how the U.S. uses water. So data centers in the U.S. consumed approximately 0.2% of the nation’s freshwater in 2023.
However, the water that was actually used onsite in data centers was only 50 million gallons per day, the rest was used to generate electricity offsite. Most electricity is generated by heating water to spin turbines, so when data centers use electricity, they also use water. Only 0.04% of America’s freshwater in 2023 was consumed inside data centers themselves. This is 3% of the water consumed by the American golf industry.
And later:
This means that every single day, the average American uses enough water for 800,000 chatbot prompts.
I suppose if we truly want to save water, we should take shorter showers.