alt Hacker NewsUsually when people compare data center water usage to golf course water usage I feel a lot better about the whole thing.
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therobots927 • today at 6:49 PM
I’d recommend you read the following report: Proximity to Golf Courses and Risk of Parkinson Disease
Individuals living within water service areas with a golf course had nearly double the odds of PD compared with individuals in water service areas without golf courses…
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
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Compare it to alfalfa and you’ll be laughing your ass off at how much water alfalfa consumes.
~340 acres of alfalfa in California growing year round uses as much water as Google’s data center in The Dalles uses in one year.
That data center used 550M gallons for evaporative cooling in 2025, which is 1687 acre-feet of water.
One acre of alfalfa in California uses ~5 acre-feet of water per acre of alfalfa per year. There are around a million acres of alfalfa grown in California, or 5 million acre-feet of water per year on alfalfa. Which is used to feed cows.