Water
I took a small break yesterday and went to play golf with my brother. I shot 91 on a 5,000-yard course, which seems a good score for my age. The key takeaway for me is that I felt as though I hit a lot of good shots, putted well, and managed to recover my form after a string of bad holes. A good day, all in all. Breaking ninety was within my grasp.
Of course, golf is a questionable game for some, and I understand why. In my state, a state plagued by drought, maintaining a golf course may not be the best use of a scarce resource, water. Although, I here tell that data centers, which are a new hot topic of local conversation, guzzle considerably more. But, in addition to being a fan of golf, I’m also a fan of artificial intelligence, so I’m hard pressed to say I oppose data centers.
In both cases, however, I worry about water because unlike electricity, which data centers consume in large volume, water is a natural resource and humans need it to live, and my state is in a double bind of growing population and declining rainfall. Seems a seminal question, do we use our water to drink or cool a CPU? Ideally, we could do both, but compromise is a bad word these days. So, it will be interesting to see the outcome, and although I’m usually optimistic, in this case I suspect money will win.