In the comments someone mentioned 400 golf courses in Arizona, and it got me to wondering...
In the US, golf courses consumed 1.68 million acre-feet of water in 2022[0] (down 29% from 2006, they are pleased to report), which works out to 1,499 million gallons per day.
So golf courses consume three times as much water as AI. Were's the proportional level of outrage over that issue, I wonder?
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.
TLDR Godwin's Law except every action becomes the act of murder.
Do I really need to say that ecological impacts and murder are very different things?
The funny part is your "murderer in the next town over" example is almost exactly how cap-and-trade works (plus a price mechanism), which is the most effective system yet devised to reduce smog from power plants. So in this area of public policy we already let off the "murderer" (eyeroll) with that excuse, and rightfully so...
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.
I have never played golf but why do you say it does not produce value for the community? Why is it better to have homes at the cost of lost recreational space?
One of the golf clubs near me has a joining fee of $50k and annual membership fees of $8k. The club next to it has annual membership fees of about $700. The one next to that has annual fees in the $1k to $3k range.
I am willing to believe that one golf club may be worth subsidising, but not three, not the ones which have locks on the gate to prevent community access, and not when the joining and membership fees are so high.
Because Golf is a very restrictive sport. It costs a lot of money to become a member, the equipment is expensive and it requires very specific dress code that's also expensive. Gold is a high society sport for a reason.
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.
I'm referring to the oversaturated mainstream media coverage, not real activist.
The golf course number was surprising so I shared it. Forgive me.
It's telling that for AI we're only given impressive-sounding water numbers, but never in the context of total consumption. It has all the hallmarks of a media-driven moral panic, not serious activism.
The fact that HN's response is to compare (these particular) water users to murderers[0] and cry whataboutism and unseriousness against me... it's not exactly helping convince me that this isn't 90% motivated moral panic and 10% legitimate grievance.
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 current projection is ~200k acre/ft by 2070 from seawater sources. It'd be cool if the AI/data center folk would combine our three ares of strength: (1) wind; (2) seawater desalination; and, (3) mass liquid piping. We'd use excess offshore wind to desalinate seawater and pump it inland.
> On the one hand, a huge dam reservoir does increase the level of water evaporation relative to an undammed river by increasing the amount of water surface area.
That depends entirely on the depth of the river and the depth of the reservoir. If the average depth of the reservoir is deeper than the average depth of a river there is less surface area.
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.
> The width increase (10-100x) completely overwhelms the depth increase (maybe 3-10x), so surface area increases substantially.
No it doesn't.
The only thing that matters (in this oversimplified calculation which only takes into account surface area) is average depth of the freshwater while it is on land. If the reservoir is on average deeper than the rivers the freshwater otherwise would be flowing in, there will be less evaporation per liter of freshwater available for use.
Now a dam also increases the total amount of freshwater that's kept on the land in a steady state situation compared to if the water flowed free into the sea. It would be absurd to count this as "extra evaporation" when this extra freshwater otherwise would've simply be lost when it would flow into the sea instead of being kept in the reservoir.
It’s more complicated than even that, I suspect, as a rapidly flowing river with rapids and spray may evaporate more water than a slow meandering river that flows smoothly.
One could argue that you misinterpret rightful notice of the same behavior which caused the conflagration in the first place. Are you "Dude" shaming me? Well then shame on you.
I find it interesting that people go to such great lengths to come up with anti-environmental positions, even when the issue they're talking about it overwhelmingly obvious without doing deep research into it.
Even without pawing over the exact numbers, having a cursory understanding of how a datacentre works should highlight to you that excessive water consumption is going to be a problem. I couldn't imagine writing essays to try and argue against that in the first place. And to be an order of magnitude wrong in your position... sheeesh.
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.
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.
In the comments someone mentioned 400 golf courses in Arizona, and it got me to wondering...
In the US, golf courses consumed 1.68 million acre-feet of water in 2022[0] (down 29% from 2006, they are pleased to report), which works out to 1,499 million gallons per day.
So golf courses consume three times as much water as AI. Were's the proportional level of outrage over that issue, I wonder?
[0] https://gcmonline.com/course/environment/news/water-manageme...
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.
TLDR Godwin's Law except every action becomes the act of murder.
Do I really need to say that ecological impacts and murder are very different things?
The funny part is your "murderer in the next town over" example is almost exactly how cap-and-trade works (plus a price mechanism), which is the most effective system yet devised to reduce smog from power plants. So in this area of public policy we already let off the "murderer" (eyeroll) with that excuse, and rightfully so...
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.
I have never played golf but why do you say it does not produce value for the community? Why is it better to have homes at the cost of lost recreational space?
One of the golf clubs near me has a joining fee of $50k and annual membership fees of $8k. The club next to it has annual membership fees of about $700. The one next to that has annual fees in the $1k to $3k range.
I am willing to believe that one golf club may be worth subsidising, but not three, not the ones which have locks on the gate to prevent community access, and not when the joining and membership fees are so high.
If you wanna have recreational space build a public park open and accessible to everyone for free.
Because Golf is a very restrictive sport. It costs a lot of money to become a member, the equipment is expensive and it requires very specific dress code that's also expensive. Gold is a high society sport for a reason.
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.
I'm referring to the oversaturated mainstream media coverage, not real activist.
The golf course number was surprising so I shared it. Forgive me.
It's telling that for AI we're only given impressive-sounding water numbers, but never in the context of total consumption. It has all the hallmarks of a media-driven moral panic, not serious activism.
The fact that HN's response is to compare (these particular) water users to murderers[0] and cry whataboutism and unseriousness against me... it's not exactly helping convince me that this isn't 90% motivated moral panic and 10% legitimate grievance.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45097661
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.
Texas used to have a great desalination plan, but it was left pretty idle. It's ... ok?
https://www.twdb.texas.gov/innovativewater/desal/doc/2024_Th...
The current projection is ~200k acre/ft by 2070 from seawater sources. It'd be cool if the AI/data center folk would combine our three ares of strength: (1) wind; (2) seawater desalination; and, (3) mass liquid piping. We'd use excess offshore wind to desalinate seawater and pump it inland.
> On the one hand, a huge dam reservoir does increase the level of water evaporation relative to an undammed river by increasing the amount of water surface area.
That depends entirely on the depth of the river and the depth of the reservoir. If the average depth of the reservoir is deeper than the average depth of a river there is less surface area.
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.
> The width increase (10-100x) completely overwhelms the depth increase (maybe 3-10x), so surface area increases substantially.
No it doesn't.
The only thing that matters (in this oversimplified calculation which only takes into account surface area) is average depth of the freshwater while it is on land. If the reservoir is on average deeper than the rivers the freshwater otherwise would be flowing in, there will be less evaporation per liter of freshwater available for use.
Now a dam also increases the total amount of freshwater that's kept on the land in a steady state situation compared to if the water flowed free into the sea. It would be absurd to count this as "extra evaporation" when this extra freshwater otherwise would've simply be lost when it would flow into the sea instead of being kept in the reservoir.
You're confusing surface area with surface area to volume ratio.
Furthermore the fact that dams increase evaporation though this mechanism is an easily verifiable scientific fact. https://riverresourcehub.org/resources/how-dams-affect-water...
It’s more complicated than even that, I suspect, as a rapidly flowing river with rapids and spray may evaporate more water than a slow meandering river that flows smoothly.
[dead]
Oops! I helped spread misinformation to a huge number of people, shoot!
The world needs more people willing to put 1500 words into a correction statement, not less.
Author seems to be still remiss in correcting the over zealous behavior.
> Does it make sense to include this water evaporation in the share of water consumed by data centers? I think it’s debatable.
“Please don't sneer”
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
One could argue that you misinterpret rightful notice of the same behavior which caused the conflagration in the first place. Are you "Dude" shaming me? Well then shame on you.
Oops!
I find it interesting that people go to such great lengths to come up with anti-environmental positions, even when the issue they're talking about it overwhelmingly obvious without doing deep research into it.
Even without pawing over the exact numbers, having a cursory understanding of how a datacentre works should highlight to you that excessive water consumption is going to be a problem. I couldn't imagine writing essays to try and argue against that in the first place. And to be an order of magnitude wrong in your position... sheeesh.
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
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.