alt Hacker NewsGoogle’s just-released 2025 sustainability report is an instructive example. The company said it consumed 10.9 billion gallons of water—a 34% increase from 2024—almost all for data-center cooling.
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Google consumes around three times as much water indirectly as directly, according to a paper published earlier this year by Alex de Vries-Gao, a researcher at the Netherlands-based university VU Amsterdam.
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My take: they should report this in acre-feet instead of gallons, and then compare it to a crop, alfalfa for example.
My back of the envelope says even at the larger number Google is using the enough water to grow about 23,000 acres of alfalfa. That would produce about 138,000 tons which would sell for about $34 million.
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The $34 million gives the idea that the water is worth $34 million, but the water costs of growing Alfalfa (largely to be used in the extremely inefficient animal agriculture industry), are a small fraction of the overall costs. Labor and 23,000 acres of land and seeds and fertilizers etc would be a significantly greater cost contributing to the $34 million value.
To add on, that is just ~40 million m^3 of water.
Desalination, turning unlimited sea water into fresh water which is one of the most expensive sources of fresh water, is ~0.50 $/m^3. They can literally manufacture the water they use with zero impact on the water table for ~20 million dollars.
I saw a criticism of the alfalfa comparison because, given the circumstances, there isn't anything better to plant where alfalfa grows. That you'd spend more water growing corn in other places or something like that. If we want to deal with alfalfa water use, eat less red meat.
Not sure how legit it is, but there is certainly more nuance to water usage.
I prefer the golf course analogy, which uses 2-3x the water of data centers and has dubious benefit to society beyond the entertainment for those who can afford the "green" fees
I find golf courses to be a more effective framing. Even if the alfalfa is consumed by animals, it's still a part of the food supply chain and gives people the easy response, "yeah, but we need to eat, we don't need datacenters."
Google's 10.9B gallons in 2025 is equivalent to ~55 18-hole golf courses (200M gallons/year average in the US). Which provided more value to the economy and to you as an individual last year? Google or 55 out of ~15k total golf courses in the US?