Kevin O’Leary says data centres use less water than golf courses. The numbers are more complicated.

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.

O’Leary scaled the project back by 75% to 10,000 acres after a letter from the Republican state senate leader. He has said the facility will use a closed-loop chilling system with no continuous water draw. Experts at Virginia Tech have said there is not enough disclosed data to verify those claims. A second water rights application for the project was withdrawn in May. O’Leary has also claimed, without evidence, that Chinese-funded “professional protesters” drove the opposition. He and Fox News are now being sued for defamation over those claims.

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The golf comparison is a deflection dressed as a statistic. Nashville Zoo is fighting a data centre proposed 50 yards from its animals, and communities across the US are organising against projects that consume water, power, and land at industrial scale. Nobody is proposing to build 9 gigawatts of new golf courses next to the Great Salt Lake. The relevant question is not whether data centres use less water than golf today, but whether a single facility in a water-stressed basin should be allowed to claim resources that could serve an ecosystem already in ecological crisis. O’Leary has an environmental studies degree. He knows the difference between a national average and a local aquifer.