Spot birds not golf

Simon Willison has a modest proposal for tech companies catching heat over data center water consumption: buy golf courses, not apologize for them. Specifically, buy exclusive country clubs, rip up the fairways, turn them into public parks, and hand the former members some binoculars so they can take up birdwatching instead. It's a joke, but it's a joke built on real math, and that's what makes it land.

Willison starts with Google's own disclosed number: 10.9 billion gallons of water used in 2025, which works out to roughly 30 million gallons a day. That's the kind of figure that shows up in headlines and immediately sounds monstrous, mostly because nobody has a good frame of reference for what 30 million gallons actually means. So he goes looking for one.

He lands on golf courses in California's Coachella Valley, an area with 120 of them, each irrigated at around 800 acre-feet of water per year. Translate that into daily terms and you get about 750,000 gallons per course, per day. Multiply that out and the math gets almost too clean: buying up roughly 40 of those courses, a third of the valley's total, would offset water use equivalent to Google's entire daily footprint.

The point isn't really about golf, or even really about Google. It's that big scary sustainability numbers tend to lose their menace once you find something comparable to measure them against. Data centers get compared to entire cities or countries, which is dramatic but not especially useful. Golf courses, oddly, turn out to be a pretty efficient reality check, and a strangely fitting one given how much water-intensive leisure infrastructure already exists without anyone blinking.

And there's a quieter jab buried in the bit about birdwatching guides: maybe the fix for water-hungry status symbols isn't more water-hungry status symbols. It's just a swap.