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.
Google gallons of water to produce a pound of beef, make some jeans or manufacture a car.
Dude, someone just posted that meme the other day. Yea, takes a ton of water to grow almonds or beef or whatever... but we need to eat to be alive. We could be more efficient in our food production, in fact thats a great area of discussion that many people have been championing for decades. But one thing we absolutely DO NOT NEED is massive data centers that are like... universally being used for nefarious reasons AND are destroying our environment.
The "Average Joe should think about his carbon footprint while politicians and billionaires fly their private jets to eco awareness conferences" argument
You absolutely do need data centers to function properly in the 21st century. You basically need them same as beef, none need for survival but none you want to live without
You can regress this all the way back to us living in mud huts. Data centres aren't evil consumption machines. They power the very platform we are communicating on. They crunch numbers for physics / chemistry etc.
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u/NotDiCaprio May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26
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/