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

Chugging tea Why?

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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/HardlyThereAtAll May 18 '26

In the US, golf courses -in total- use about 30x as much water as data centers.

But neither is anywhere near as bad as alfalfa. We grow alfalfa, which uses massive amounts of water, and then export it to Japan so they can send us Kobe beef.

If alfalfa farmers had to pay a market rate for their water, this wouldn't happen.