> that they consume a lot of water based on a discredited book with elementary math errors.

How exactly do you think they dissipate the heat of a continuous 100 MW or 1 GW power draw? I have no idea what book you're referring to but you can do the math yourself it's quite straightforward.

The book is "Empire of AI". This blog post explains it pretty well: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-mislead...

Basically, the author (of the book) compares a data center outside Santiago to usage of water by humans, erroneously imputing that the average human uses only 200 cc of water per day.