The article source for the 17B gallons is a Congressional Research Service report and its source is a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report. Both are interesting reads. The 17B number is an estimate. Here are some of the inputs:
* reported numbers of server deliveries
* power draw per server
* average utilization based on various workloads, including a Llama 70B 8 node training run
* mix of data center cooling types
* do math to get to 66B liters, which rounds down to 17B galoons
1. https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/2024-lbnl-data-center-energ...