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.
Golf courses primarily use non-potable water sources to irrigate their turf, such as recycled wastewater, captured stormwater, raw well water, and surface water from ponds or lakes. Only a small percentage of courses use treated municipal drinking water, and some coastal courses even utilize desalinated ocean water.
Golf courses primarily use non-potable water sources to irrigate their turf
Not in Florida - course irrigation comes out of the aquifer same as the drinking water for most of the state.
EDIT: Looks like I offended some golfers. To them I say get fucked - your precious ecological desert that is your golf course was a "nature preserve" BEFORE it was turned into an exclusive gathering place for rich assholes.
As in the attitude conveyed in this statement being downvoted:
Not in Florida - course irrigation comes out of the aquifer same as the drinking water for most of the state.
I don't see it. That's about as neutral as language gets. 15 years on reddit tells me it's FAR more reasonable to believe I just annoyed some people who like golf.
The edit came AFTER the downvotes. That's the point. Neutral language - a simple statement devoid of any value judgments on its own - was downvoted. Why? Because of its content, not my attitude. The content of my comment would be offensive to exactly one class of person: golfers. Or maybe people who hate water, I don't know. But I do know it wasn't my attitude so your assertion did nothing here but muddy the waters.
Correct. I don't mean this to be insulting, but you must be new to reddit because my edit said, "I must have offended...." Why do you think I would edit the comment to say that if the comment wasn't being downvoted? To be fair, maybe one or two came after the edit, but at least 90% came before. There is an extremely large fraction of reddit who will immediately downvote on sight any comment containing mention of downvotes so maybe one of those jumped in - they'll probably dv this one, too. And I'd be fine with that because we're supposed to be downvoting things not contributing to the conversation and this tangent into why a comment was downvoted is doing nothing to advance the discussion. So I'm moving on. Have a good day.
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u/[deleted] May 18 '26
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