Google’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.
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?
You might not use any Google products. But pretty much all of your goods and services providers do. Google is providing significant value to you second hand.
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.
My point was that google generates hundreds of billions of dollars from the same water that $34 million in alfalfa. It’s absurd to complain about their usage.
Water use policy is about agriculture, agriculture, and also agricultural. Everything else is a distraction.
Agriculture uses orders of magnitudes more water than data centers. A 50% cut in water use by data centers will have nowhere near the impact of a 5% cut in water use by agriculture. But data centers can generate orders of magnitude more revenue.
Say rain water is leaking into your house from two holes in the roof: one is 1 meter in diameter, the other is 1cm. Any effort you spend plugging the 1cm hole is a distraction from the 1m hole you really need to focus on.
You could make an argument that agriculture is different because we need agricultural products to live. But we don't need those specific products to live (alfalfa, almonds, etc), and they could be grown far more efficiently if water were priced by market rates.
Yes, just like you can't eat trucks, roads, grocery stores, tractors, combines, crop dusters, grain silos, mills, or the FDA. Any system needs many components, most of which aren't directly consumed by someone.
My comment conveyed the meaning that you aren't adequately interpreting the point of GP.
To ask "What point?" Is disingenuous, since the point was laid out pretty clearly in the lineage of comments you were responding to.
I don't/can't know why you are struggling to grasp the point. It may be because you don't want to, or it may be because you are missing some other knowledge or perspective - the only way to sus that out is for you to engage with genuine curiosity. That's outside my control. I can confirm as an external party that you are missing the point of the GP, but I can't force you to want to understand it.
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.
Neat, implementing this would be a great marketing move for Google/OpenAI/Amazon/MS. Relatively cheap way to win a lot of goodwill from the millions of people who don't know much about the space but are swayed by current water usage arguments.
Of course location matters a ton in the water usage argument but I'm not sure how relevant this actually is when it comes to winning over hearts and minds.
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
…
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.
—
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.