We may be anti-artificial intelligence (AI) for many reasons, from too much technology, too much intrusion, and too many wrong words autofilled, to too much water consumption. While water is a grave concern, AI comes out ahead of golf courses in consumption.

A typical 18-hole golf course uses 312,000 gallons of water per day, or 2.08 billion gallons daily across the US, compared to 449 million gallons per day for US data center cooling (Golf Course Superintendents Assoc.).

Extreme weather affects this figure. In hot Maricopa County, Arizona, golf courses use 30x more water than data centers but generate only two-thirds the tax revenue. In Texas, data centers use 0.4% of the state’s total water, while agriculture in arid states consumes 70-80% of the water.

Organic Magazine reminds us that the digital world is not separate from the natural world. We who consume much have much to think about—which crops to grow, how big to build our homes, and… do we need bigger and better everything?

One photo in Cloud storage consumes a minuscule amount of energy cooled by water, but multiply your photos stored in the Cloud by hundreds of millions of people, and the consumption of resources is staggering. Google alone stores 20 exabytes of data, much of it from photos and videos (Organic Magazine).

The following are not solutions, but they help, especially “if everybody did it”:

Send photos and videos to friends by text, not email. Go through photos and videos to delete doubles and those you don’t want, to free up space on your device and the Cloud. If data storage continues to grow and AI centers continue to pepper the countryside, golf courses will come out smelling like a rose.

By Brenda Kame’enui