Water-wasting is not a red herring if you live in an area where droughts are an issue. It just isn't a problem everywhere universally.

▲

_kulang a day ago | parent | next [-]

You’d have to live there, in the presence of a data centre for AI which actually wastes water. The numbers people throw around on social media are absurd. I’m pretty sure they do not take into account the circular reuse of water for cooling, and just look at flow rates passing over chips.

▲

simonw a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Like golf courses in the desert.

(... Palm Springs has around 100 golf courses)

▲

kragen a day ago | parent [-]

While we're talking about Americans using anything but the metric system (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746745), how many golf courses' worth of water is Google's 10.9 billion "gallons" a year?

▲

zahlman a day ago | parent [-]

ChatGPT tells me

> As a historical U.S. benchmark, an average 18-hole facility had about 80.7 irrigated turf acres and used approximately 152.5 acre-feet/year—about 49.7 million gallons (188 million litres) annually.

So about 220.

But it's still, ahem, a drop in the bucket compared to the California almond industry.

	▲	simonw a day ago \| parent [-]
		A while back I satirically suggested https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/17/spot-birds-not-golf/ that if hyperscalers wanted to relieve the pressure over data center water use they could buy up a few dozen country clubs and turn them into public parks. (I was only half joking)