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O’Leary’s golf course defense misses the water trend
Kevin O’Leary is right that US golf courses currently use more water than data centers, but projections show that gap could flip by 2028.
Image: TNW
Kevin O’Leary’s claim that data centers use far less water than US golf courses is accurate on today’s numbers, but it leaves out where the trend is heading.
The “Shark Tank” investor, whose 40,000-acre Stratos data center project in Utah drew protests and prompted an executive order from the governor, told Business Insider that AI data centers consume much less water than golf courses. Current estimates support that comparison: the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America says US courses use 2.08 billion gallons of water per day for irrigation, while US data centers use about 449 million gallons per day for cooling, according to the Florida Water & Pollution Control Operators Association. That puts golf at roughly 4.6 times higher water use.
But the underlying trajectories are very different. Golf course demand is flat or falling as operators adopt drought-resistant grasses and recycled water. Data center demand, by contrast, is rising sharply as AI training and inference workloads expand. On central projections cited by TNW, data center water use is expected to overtake golf around 2026 or 2027 and reach about 590 billion gallons by 2028, versus golf’s roughly flat 425 billion gallons.
In May, Utah’s governor signed an executive order setting new development standards tied specifically to the Stratos Project, which was initially planned on 40,000 acres near the already shrinking Great Salt Lake. After a letter from the Republican state senate leader, O’Leary cut the project by 75% to 10,000 acres. He has said the facility will use a closed-loop chilling system with no continuous water draw, but Virginia Tech experts said there is not enough public data to verify that. A second water rights application for the project was also withdrawn in May.
O’Leary has separately alleged, without evidence, that Chinese-funded “professional protesters” were behind opposition to the project. He and Fox News are now being sued for defamation over those claims.
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TNW argues the golf comparison obscures the real issue: not national averages, but whether a massive facility in a water-stressed basin should be allowed to draw on resources near an ecosystem already under pressure.
Enterprise Editor
Marcus follows the money. He covers enterprise software, cloud architecture, and the tectonic shifts in Big Tech strategy. He translates dense earnings calls and complex M&A activity into actionable insights about where the industry is actually heading. If a tech giant makes a silent pivot, Marcus is usually the first to notice.
via TNW
