At long last, Amazon has reported how much water its global data centers use: 2.5 billion gallons in 2025. The company said it “returned” two-thirds of that water back to communities it operates in — mainly by investing in public infrastructure projects — as part of a broader goal to be “water positive” by 2030.
By disclosing this data for the first time, Amazon joins its competitors Google, Meta, and Microsoft, each of which have reported aggregate totals for water withdrawal and replenishment dating back to at least 2020. Amazon didn’t publish historical tables, but said that between 2024 and 2025 the company decreased its total water withdrawal despite increasing data center capacity. That would buck an industry trend, which shows water use has generally increased over the last five years.
Amazon’s announcement comes as opposition to data centers escalates in communities across the country, where residents are raising concerns about the impact on local water systems, utility bills, and noise. Part of the frustration stems from a lack of transparency about how much water data centers for artificial intelligence expect to use, which many hyperscalers don’t disclose during the earliest stages of development, when siting decisions happen. Google and Meta are the only companies that report water withdrawal for every municipality they operate in, though only after a data center is already operational.
Brandon Oyer, head of energy and water for the Americas at AWS, acknowledged that people are demanding more transparency. He said the company is happy to disclose total water volumes. But he thinks the figure doesn’t offer a complete picture of the work Amazon is doing to become more water efficient — meaning using less water for every unit of computing power.
“I think a water efficiency metric is the best metric to focus on,” Oyer said. “If you can do more with less, then that is the best way to scale up.” By contrast, he added, total water volumes are “just big numbers.”
Amazon reported Thursday that its data centers on average used 0.03 gallons of water per kilowatt-hour of electricity in 2025, a 52% improvement in water efficiency since 2021, and much better than the industry average. That’s because their data centers use air cooling for most of the year. Amazon has tested and confirmed that it can operate buildings at 85 degrees Fahrenheit, reserving evaporative cooling for the hottest days of the year. Air cooling technology is more energy intensive, while evaporation uses more water.
That is a balance Amazon has to consider, depending on where its data centers are located, Oyer said. “We’re evaporating water less than 10% of the year,” he added. “If we can drive up the outside temperature at which we have to use evaporation, that saves water.”
Oyer added that Amazon has also found ways to use less energy at data centers, which in turn indirectly reduces the amount of water needed to cool power equipment.
The industry’s average water efficiency was cited in a peer-reviewed study published in January by a researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. It was based on data from the International Energy Agency on data centers’ global water and electricity use. But the study said that data center operators “urgently” need to disclose more granular information on their water and energy footprints in order to improve the estimate and “responsibly manage the growing environmental impact of AI systems.”
Even without specifics, it’s clear that water use across the industry is surging. In 2023, before the AI boom was fully underway, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that U.S. data centers consumed 17 billion gallons of water directly through cooling, and projected that by 2028, that amount could double to nearly 33 billion gallons.
By comparison, that would be about 1% of the water that Americans use on their lawns each year. But data centers also indirectly consume water because the power plants they rely on for electricity have their own cooling needs. (The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam study noted that Meta is the only company reporting indirect water consumption).
Oyer said Amazon is focused on making data centers as water efficient as possible while also investing in using more reclaimed water that otherwise would be wasted. The company has 26 data centers using 100% reclaimed water, including from wastewater treatment plants. Amazon also estimates that its 50 water infrastructure water projects — from a new storage aquifer in Oregon to reducing irrigated water on farms — will eventually return more than 5.8 billion gallons of water annually to localities.
