Data center water use is a really interesting question. It seems like a space with a lot of room for technological improvement, where we've simply been optimizing for the wrong thing so far: we've been minimizing energy use, but there are a lot of opportunities for being more careful about water consumption.
I don't think much of this is down to "AI" specifically. If we outlawed all NNs bigger than 1B, I don't think the number of data centers would stop growing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kinxp0/eli5_why_do_data_centers_use_freshwater/
I'm not saying water is not a problem. What's interesting is teasing out the solution.
It seems to be mostly down to regulation to build fewer datacenters, and to build more efficient ones.
What the data centers are ultimately used for (GenAI, content recommendation or compressing video) doesn't factor into it that much. All of these are subject to massive market pressure, and all of them run on the same hardware.
Happy to see that oil immersion cooling is still going as a viable option. I remember back in the slashdot days people were building desktop cases filled with sunflower oil, which would run with no problem (and cool beautifully).
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/servers/how-practical-is-dunking-servers-in-mineral-oil-exactly-
It seems like the main concern is that it's a "bit gross".