I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption

i’ve seen plenty of people upset at golf courses, in fact it was so prominent a lot of golf courses were actively looking at ways they could use more water friendly landscaping on the sides of greens instead of the lush landscaping.

either way, if a murderer says “why are you charging me? someone else was murdereded last night in the next town over!” People would rightfully laugh at the murderer and continue to charge him, and rightfully so.

People actually interested in environmental responsibility have been screaming about golf courses for decades and have succeeded at slowly improving regulations over the years. This kind of whataboutism comes off as very tired and unserious in 2025.

Golf courses also get de-facto tax subsidies under a property value tax, because they're basically empty lots.

If you bought that golf course and built something productive that produced value for the community, like apartments, detached houses, a factory, a store, anything at all, you'd suddenly have to pay more tax on it.

A land value tax would push golf courses further from city centers.

What is the growth rate of golf course water consumption?

I think, using the same measure as the OP, this number should be even higher since a fair proportion of this water will have sat in dams.

AZ locals generally hate the golf courses

Different kettles of fish I guess and I've no doubt people have been complaining about golf course water usage.

The AI comparison mentioned I believe is really just data center consumption which goes much further than just AI but a large amount of important compute power and storage, with most of it unseen.

Golf courses are at least pleasant to look at and whilst they might use a lot of water, most people can understand it given their own need to water their own lawns. Whereas a data center uses both comparative levels of water, but also enormous amounts of electricity. Whereas a golf course doesn't use even a small fraction of the same amount of electricity.

Even large parklands and other green areas need large amounts of water, but most people are not going to disagree with that.

The world needs more people willing to put 1500 words into a correction statement, not less.

I had the same initial thought as well, but I realized this caveat would only be true if dams just made rivers deeper. But dams flood valleys and they make the water body much wider, not just deeper. A river that was 300 feet wide becomes a lake that’s miles wide. The width increase (10-100x) completely overwhelms the depth increase (maybe 3-10x), so surface area increases substantially.

Given that Earth averages towards smooth, the rate of width increase overwhelms the rate of depth increase when dams fill.

The only exceptions might be narrow canyon dams with nowhere to spread laterally, or dams on already-wide rivers. But those are rare.

I think its important to ask: we will have to tackle water scarcity, but for what end? how many and who benefits and what compromises will be necessary?

This is true when examining the environmental impact of anything.

Not only that, but the guy is clearly out of his element, but makes a big smart looking report and this wrong by a factor of 10.

Ground water is not fungible economic value. When its gone it is gone because the aquifers collapse. The CA central valley dropped 9M from 1925 to 1977 [1]

The space the water was in, is gone. Datacenters pumping groundwater will do the same exact thing.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1jby06/this_is_the_im...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35582-x

“Please don't sneer”

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html