TL;DRO’Leary compared data centre water use to golf courses. Golf uses 4.6x more today, but data centre demand could overtake it by 2028 on current projections.

Kevin O’Leary is making the golf course argument again. The “Shark Tank” investor, whose 40,000-acre Stratos data centre project in Utah sparked protests and a governor’s executive order, told Business Insider that AI data centres consume far less water than America’s golf courses. The comparison is technically correct today. The Golf Course Superintendents Association of America estimates US courses use 2.08 billion gallons of water per day for irrigation. US data centres use roughly 449 million gallons per day for cooling, according to the Florida Water & Pollution Control Operators Association.

That is a 4.6x gap, and O’Leary is not wrong to point it out. But the two curves are moving in opposite directions. Golf course water use is flat or declining as the industry shifts toward drought-resistant grasses and recycled water. Data centre water demand is on an exponential trajectory driven by AI training and inference workloads. On central projections, total data centre water consumption is expected to pass golf around 2026 or 2027 and reach roughly 590 billion gallons by 2028, against golf’s flat 425 billion gallons. Utah’s governor signed an executive order in May setting new development standards specifically because of the Stratos Project, which was originally planned on 40,000 acres next to the already-shrinking Great Salt Lake.