Amazon revealed that its data centers consumed roughly 9.5 billion liters of water
Amazon announced that its data centers worldwide used approximately 9.5 billion liters of water last year, at a time of intense political debate over the water and electricity consumption of cloud infrastructure.
The amount corresponds to roughly 5% of the annual water consumption of the Seattle metropolitan area. The company, the world's largest in the cloud computing sector, argues that the figures show more efficient cooling of its facilities compared with certain major technology competitors.
The announcement comes as states and cities, including Seattle, have considered or implemented moratoriums on the construction of new server facilities, in part to allow further study of their impacts.
Water researchers and community representatives are asking for more detailed figures from Amazon and other companies, so that the actual water use per region can be made clearer. Iris Stewart-Frey, a professor of environmental science at Santa Clara University and the lead author of a report on water use by data centers in California, stresses that transparency is essential so that communities can weigh costs and benefits, since conditions differ significantly from place to place.
Gradually, more data is becoming public. After a long legal battle in Oregon, the city of The Dalles agreed to release records on the amount of municipal water used by Google's data centers. Utah recently passed the first water transparency law for data centers, requiring new large developments to disclose annual water withdrawals and other figures.
Among the major cloud service providers, only Google and Meta publish water consumption figures for each data center separately. It nonetheless remains uncertain whether Amazon's new transparency initiative will be enough to allay the concerns and criticism it faces.
Kerry Person, a vice president at Amazon Web Services responsible for data center operations, said that the company's data shows that the picture of an industry consuming all the world's water is far from reality.
The AWS data centers that use water for cooling chill the servers with air drawn from the environment. When the temperature exceeds 85 degrees, the air passes through a filter soaked with water, is cooled before it enters the halls, and part of the water evaporates.
In areas with limited water resources, such as the Phoenix region and Saudi Arabia, Amazon states that it does not rely on external water sources for cooling. There, air-cooled chillers are used that circulate refrigerant and water in closed loops.
The calculation of water use efficiency and Amazon's annual total withdrawal include both the water that evaporates during cooling and liquids discharged into wastewater systems or other networks. Person noted that the company follows a conservative approach, although this makes direct comparisons difficult, since other companies usually do not include discharged water.
Amazon reports that its facilities withdrew approximately 0.12 liters of water per kilowatt-hour of electricity last year, down from 0.15 liters in 2024. Microsoft reported 0.27 liters per kilowatt-hour in its most recent fiscal year, while AWS estimated the industry average at 0.84 liters per kilowatt-hour.
Amazon's figures concern facilities that AWS owns or leases and do not include colocation spaces, which in 2024 accounted for roughly one-fifth of the company's available computing power. They also do not include the water required to produce the electricity that powers the data centers.
Amazon has set a goal, by 2030, of returning to the environment and to other users more water than it withdraws, funding projects such as watershed restoration and the upgrading of wells and water systems. The company already channels water into 26 of its own data centers and is working on more than 100 additional water recovery projects.
