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.