Golf for Birds: An Ironic Recipe for Saving Data-Center Water

A tongue-in-cheek proposal for the big technology companies facing criticism over their data centers' water consumption has appeared on developer Simon Willison's blog.

The idea goes like this: the companies should buy up a few elite country clubs, shut down the golf courses, and turn them into public parks. Former club members would be offered compensation in the form of guides and binoculars — to help them switch to a greener hobby, birdwatching.

The author's math rests on concrete figures. According to him, in 2025 Google used 10.9 billion gallons of water, which works out to roughly 30 million gallons a day.

By way of comparison, California's Coachella Valley is home to 120 golf courses, each of which consumes about 800 acre-feet of water a year — on the order of 750,000 gallons a day per course.

Consequently, if Google were to buy up about 40 such courses — that is, roughly a third of the total in the valley — that would be enough to offset the company's daily water use.

The post is ironic in nature and serves more as a comment on the scale of the problem than as a practical recommendation. It vividly demonstrates that data centers' water use is comparable to the water spent on maintaining golf courses in arid regions.

The subject of data centers' resource consumption remains a sensitive one for the artificial intelligence industry amid the growth of computing power and its attendant infrastructure.

Source: Simon Willison