you mean the absolutely miniscule amounts of water they use compared to other industries?

Do you have a source for this claim? But also, are you aware that "other people are doing bad" is not a good reason to do bad?

Here is some reading you might be interested in.

There are two phases, and both consume water. Training, building the model in the first place, is intensely concentrated. Reporting indicates Microsoft’s Iowa facilities used over 13 million gallons in a single peak month while GPT-4 was being trained, more freshwater in a month than 130,000 Americans use in the same period.

Inference, serving answers to users, is smaller per request but never stops. As usage scales to billions of daily prompts, researchers expect the cumulative water cost of running deployed models to eventually exceed the one-time cost of training them. Both phases compound with every new model generation.

.The real pressure point is local, where a single facility can strain a community’s supply, and the most practical demand from researchers is transparency. Until disclosure improves, the precise size of AI’s thirst will remain genuinely contested.

https://techjournal.org/does-ai-use-water-data-centers

How about another?

Data centers have a thirst for water, and their rapid expansion threatens freshwater supplies.

Together, the nation’s 5,426 data centers consume billions of gallons of water annually. One report estimated that U.S. data centers consume 449 million gallons of water per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021). A 2016 report found that fewer than one-third of data center operators track water consumption. Water consumption is expected to continue increasing as data centers grow in number, size, and complexity.

.Approximately 80% of the water (typically freshwater) withdrawn by data centers evaporates, with the remaining water discharged to municipal wastewater facilities. The large volume of wastewater from data centers may overwhelm existing local facilities, which were not designed to handle such a high volume.

https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption

One more for now.

Not only do they consume massive amounts of water, but two-thirds of new data centers built or in development globally since 2022 are located in places already plagued by water stress. Even before the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, communities complained about data centers guzzling millions of gallons of water from cities without much to spare (Bass et al., 2025).

Data centers evaporate 80% of the water drawn and discharge 20% to wastewater treatment. Residential evaporative cooling, on the other hand, loses 10% of water to evaporation, discharging the other 90%. The majority of AI specialised data centers use evaporation-based cooling 24/7 or, at minimum, during hot days. Even more data centers are expected to do so by 2028.

On direct water consumption alone, data centers rank in the top 10 highest water-consuming American industrial or commercial industries. Yet, a 2021 survey found that only 51% of data center operators track their water usage.

https://ethicalgeo.org/the-cloud-is-drying-our-rivers-water-usage-of-ai-data-centers/

But yeah, sure. "Miniscule."