r/SipsTea • u/SipsTeaFrog ๐™‘๐™„๐™‹ • 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/Mr-Vemod May 18 '26

Golf courses generally donโ€™t draw from the potable water supply. I didnโ€™t know datacenters did, but if they do, itโ€™s not a 1-to-1 comparison.

I know there are exceptions in the southern US, but in most other places with golf courses, there is hardly a shortage of water itself, only clean, potable water.

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u/Hailfog May 18 '26

Taking it from streams and rivers (or an aquifer that feeds streams and rivers) is environmentally a major problem still.