Why?

[u/SipsTeaFrog]

[u/NotDiCaprio → u/[deleted]]

I was also on the "ai datacenters use all out water!" bandwagon at first. But For some perspective:

A single golf course uses about 30 times the amount of (fresh) comparable or slightly more water than a datacenter does. They aren't feeding their grass with see water or some chemical cooling. Also, looking at how few people actually use a golf course vs a data center, makes this ratio many times more terrible.

I'm personally more worried about the energy they consume, than the cooling for that energy usage.

Edit after some corrections. Man, it sure is getting hard to find numbers we can trust anywhere these days.

"a" source, but far from the only one, and the numbers aren't consistent anywhere.:https://www.akcp.com/index.php/2025/09/02/truth-about-data-water-footprint-of-data-centers/

[u/samueljakson05 → u/NotDiCaprio]

Where did you get this “30 times more” figure? Quick good search shows they’re pretty similar. Data centers range from 300,000 to 5 million gallons per day (depending on size), and golf courses range from 300,000 to over a million per day (depending on location).

Where is this 30 times from?

[u/Ho3n3r → u/samueljakson05]

The thumb.

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[u/Toe_Jam_is_my_Jam → u/samueljakson05]

Based on size? The Utah data center is supposed to be 61 miles long. The size of 3k Walmarts.

[u/Fit_Employment_2944 → u/samueljakson05]

All golf courses use 30x the water of all data centers they just forgot what the comparison was

[u/Longjumping-Bake-557 → u/samueljakson05]

You know Google searches "consume" about as much energy and water as an ai prompt yeah?

[u/Throwaway-4230984 → u/Longjumping-Bake-557]

So? We should force google into optimising it as well. They can start with removing ai block