That AI consumes it at an abnormally high rate, presumably.

The claim never made sense to me either, I can only assume those that regurgitated such claims never worked with HPC or even general datacenters before.

Was recently talking to a (non-technical) friend about this, she was surprised after talking about the "insane water use for AI datacenters" when I responded that open-loop cooling is pretty rare for a datacenter and I've never actually seen it used before, versus closed-loop (or just regular air-based cooling) which has no real noticable water consumption.

It was never that dramatic, and it’s declining day by day. It’s a panic over a real but small problem.

Order of magnitude more water is lost from wasted irrigation (e.g. during rain, of fallow fields, sprayed into windy air, etc) than data centers.

That AI data centers are drinking up local ground water for cooling. It isn't (or wasn't) nonsense, though. It was/is a real thing, though it seems to be on the out in favor of closed loop cooling after the massive and still on-going public outcry.

The outcry over data centers using a fraction of the water used for things like golf courses or growing alfalfa in a desert.