> The environmental impact of keeping a huge amount of land watered so a few thousand people can bat their balls around is ongoing.

True, but do you add chemicals to that water, and does it becomes unusable at the end of the day? At worst, that water gets in soil and goes somewhere else, and some of it evaporates.

Open loop datacenter cooling is not like that though (you add tons of chemicals to that water to prevent scaling and to kill algae), and closed loop is not that harmful, but big AI datacenters don't use that because it's wee bit more expensive.

The most "water hungry" sectors can reuse that water, or at least redirect it for agriculture. AI Datacenters are different. They are built in the cheapest way, hence they are very dirty both in carbon footprint and water-body fouling.

Golf courses at least trap some carbon by growing grass. It's almost bitterly funny in comparison.

For clarity, it seems possible to filter out these chemicals (alongside everything else) with reverse osmosis, but companies which don't invest in closed loop systems (which reduces water demand by ~90% BTW), won't invest in reverse osmosis, which is way more expensive w.r.t. closed loop systems, I believe.

If someone has more precise resources or information which they can point me to, I'd love to update my knowledge.

Also, this doesn't negate CO2 emissions of these plants.