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Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

The golf courses in my town provide infinitely more value to me than anything from Google.

And I don't even golf.

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.

How is everything else a distraction? We are overusing our water budget so every little piece on top is extra impactful.

I don’t really know how to rephrase it. It’s a distraction.

This article could have been about shipping alfalfa to the Middle East and Asia, but instead it was about this.

That’s not a distraction. It’s one of the many ways in which data centers are problematic. Why shouldn’t it be talked about as such?

Because it's not really problematic, in the same way that the pollution from campfires isn't a problem. Sure, there's some theoretical pollution from that, but there's about a billion things on the list above it, and you clearly don't give two shits about any of those. You're on a crusade against campfires, not actually interested in pollution, and thus you can be safely ignored.

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.

> data centers can generate orders of magnitude more revenue

You can't eat data.

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.

Missing the point. There's absolute bare minimum food that you need to eat regardless of everything else.

Alfalfa isn’t food.

It most certainly is. It may not be the food that you like to eat personally.

certainly second hand food via bovine

You are the one who is missing the point.

Am I? What point? In my comment I stated the missed point, yours is entirely devoid of real meaning.

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.

You bothered to write 3 paragraphs close to the original comment length 100% being a personal attack, and failed to articulate the point in context of my comment, let alone explain how the original comment answers the eat bit.

I pointed out the question you asked seemed disingenuous and how it appeared you weren't being intellectually curious (which is the point of HN). If you treat every criticism as a personal attack then you're likely to stagnate in terms of your growth.

Here is the point from the comment you responded to, copy and pasted for your convenience. Please prove to me that spoon feeding you makes a difference:

> 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.

Got me there.

Thinking back I believe the logic was that the quote essentially says market will fix the issue, but that explanation is questionable. We know it is questionable precisely because the "fix" for the market not to starve people is more regulation. And the discussion is precisely about regulation of that kind, so the argument is circular.

That 1cm leak is going to lead to mold in my house so both need to be addressed.

Maybe imagine your in a canoe with a hole the size of your fist and another hole the size of a pin. Where do you spend your time to keep from sinking?

You have to understand that this isn't really about leaks. It's a holy war against pinholes, so empiricism or pragmatism isn't remotely relevant.

Yes, but we have a whole cohort of people hopping around and screeching about the 1cm hole while basically no one cares about the 1m hole. Distraction.

> My point was that google generates hundreds of billions of dollars from the same water that $34 million in alfalfa

Food is more important than whatever google does. :/

Radical Luddite posting on the internet is … something.

It wasn't the Looms / technology they hated - it was being put out of work and discarded.

What's your argument here?

I would love to hear why you think food is not actually more important than data centers.

Random passerby here...

There is a term for your argument, it's called a "suckers choice".

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.

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

You can just not plant anything. It’s not required that every inch of desert is used for irrigated cultivation.

Alfalfa is the cleanest case of a crop that would not be planted nearly as much if western water law (prior appropriation) wasn’t so colossally stupid.

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