Laurence Moroney - The AI Guy.

The thirsty data center

  • Oct 27, 2026

There’s been a lot of debate, and strong political narrative about data centers recently. And often the issue comes down to their environmental impact. I have heard massive concerns about how they use up water that should be used by people.

And they are valid concerns.

But are they enough to argue that we should not go full steam ahead into the AI revolution by building more? Before answering that question one way or another, I’d like you to compare them with something far more burgeouise: Golf.

Water and desert map on a desk with data center and golf course notes

The two averages

With golf, the national picture is well-known. The Golf Course Superintendents Association of America estimates that U.S. golf facilities applied about 532 billion gallons of irrigation water in 2024 across 13,952 facilities. Divide that out and you get about 100,000 gallons per day for the average facility.

Data centers are messier. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s 2024 report for the U.S. Department of Energy estimates about 17 billion gallons of direct, on-site water use in 2023, mostly for cooling. That is about 48 million gallons a day for the whole sector. LBNL also built a geospatial inventory of more than 3,000 U.S. data centers. Spread the sector water evenly across those mapped sites and you land near 16,000 gallons per day.

I treat that data-center figure as a rough average, not a precise one. Facilities range from small rooms to giant campuses, and cooling design swings the meter hard. Still, it is the clearest per-day number I can hang on a primary national total and a grounded facility count.

The Giants

But what happens when you look beyond the averages at the largest examples of each?

Las Vegas Valley Water District figures, widely reported as about 236 million gallons a year for the average Southern Nevada course, work out to about 650,000 gallons a day per golf course. Palm Springs and the wider Coachella Valley sit in the same dry story: many courses there run in a similar high daily band because irrigation is what keeps the grass alive.

Similarly evidence of large hyperscale AI campuses sit far above the national average. Google’s 2025 water table puts Council Bluffs, Iowa at about 3.7 million gallons a day, Mayes County, Oklahoma at about 3.0 million, Berkeley County, South Carolina at about 2.5 million, New Albany, Ohio at about 2.3 million, and The Dalles, Oregon at about 1.3 million. Those are absolute campus consumption figures from Google’s 2026 Environmental Report, yearly totals divided by 365. This handful of data centers use water at 4-5x the rate of the thirstiest golf courses.

But the difference of course, is volume. There are a handful of data centers that use this order of magnitude of water.

THere are approximately 1,000 golf courses in the dry state of California, 835 in Texas, and 110 in Nevada, including about 100 in desert cities like Palm Springs and 50-60 in Las Vegas.

It’s clear that Golf, in volume is a far larger guzzler of water than data centers.

Where the water goes next

Volume is only half the question. What happens after the water leaves the pipe matters too.

On many data-center campuses that use evaporative cooling, a large share of the water turns into steam and returns to the air, where it can fall again as rain somewhere else in the cycle. Golf irrigation mostly soaks into soil and turf, and much of it leaves the site as runoff that carries fertilizers, pesticides, and other additives with it.

I have not found a clean national study that puts those two fates on equal terms, and I will not invent one. Still, when you already know the daily averages, it helps to notice that evaporative cooling often sends water back up into the sky, and that golf irrigation can keep more of it on the ground, sometimes with chemistry attached.

Who uses them?

Think about how many people a day of golf play actually serves. A course that runs about six tee times an hour across roughly twelve open hours has about 72 tee times. At about four players each, that is roughly 288 customers in a day. Hold that next to the national golf average of about 100,000 gallons a day, and you feel how much water sits behind one ordinary day of rounds. In the desert, where we saw this amount climb to 650,000 gallons a day, the same customer count sits on a much heavier meter.

The positive economic impact of golf is without question. Those hundreds of customers per day have so much more add-on value.

But can’t we argue that AI data centers are at least equally valuable? Particularly when they may be driving value to millions of people, not hundreds?

Is it hypocritical of us, as a society, to massively support golf at the same time we want to hamstring the construction and usage of data centers because of water ?

Location, Location, Location

The irony is that golf courses tend to be built in sunny locations. Places where water is more valuable than the average location. Many golf courses sit where water is already scarce: Las Vegas, Palm Springs, and other dry basins where people, farms, and fairways share the same limited supply. The national golf average softens that story, while the desert daily numbers keep the scarcity in view. When irrigation runs that high in a dry valley, every gallon drawn for turf is a gallon that other uses also need.

Data centers, on the other hand, aren’t necessarily put into places where water is quite as precious or scarce. But, somehow, the narrative still places them as a problem when it comes to water use.

Now what?

Take this into account when the popular narrative pushes that data centers are a problem, and that we should avoid building them altogether because of their water usage. And ask, if we really care about water that much, why are we okay with the far thirstier golf industry?

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