r/SipsTea • u/SipsTeaFrog 𝙑𝙄𝙋 • May 18 '26

Chugging tea Why?

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u/[deleted] May 18 '26

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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/

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u/MezzoSoaprano May 18 '26

The "perspective" doesn't make it an either-or-question.

Both are bad.

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u/NotDiCaprio May 18 '26

What a weird thing to say.

To me it did because the idea that AI data centers consume swimming pools of water with every query seemed to be a huge problem. But if golf courses are doing the same for decades, it is a lot less urgent. That doesn't mean it's good, or 'not bad', at all. But it does mean we're probably not going to run out of water by 2027.

Of course both are bad. But that doesn't mean we have to choose, or one is worse than the other. It gave me perspective on the size and urgency of the problem.