Fuck I hate it when anything uses "water consumed" as a bad thing.
Writing a 100-word email consumes about 500ml of water (17 oz).
500ml of water is used in a cooling system. This water is not lost in any way, it's just warmed up and evaporated. Which then falls as rain again.
If you draw more water from a particular area than that area can support it's a bad thing. Otherwise, this is just a stupid argument made to appeal to emotions rather than logic.
Where I live, our main water source is a lake, and we only even bother closing the weir(a type of dam) that holds the water in come the middle of March, and open it completely again in October. We just just let billions of liters flow directly out to the ocean the rest of the year.
Especially for AI, you don't need to locate datacenters near population centers at all, the latency doesn't affect that use case at all. So it should be easy enough to build them in locations that have easy access to cheap energy and large amounts of water, pretty much anywhere that has a hydro electric dam is a good choice.
