Amazon Publishes Global Datacenter Water Consumption Figure

Datacenters consumed 2.5 billion gallons in 2025

By publishing its total datacenter water use for the first time, Amazon has taken a significant step towards transparency, though not necessarily accountability.

Amazon has, for the first time, told the world how much water it uses. The company, in a blog post, published a figure of 2.5 billion gallons across its whole global datacenter estate for 2025.

The company contextualises this figure by claiming two things. Firstly, that it uses water much more efficiently than rival hyperscalers, and secondly, that it remains on track to become "water positive" by 2030. In fact, Amazon claims to be 75% of the way to that target.

Water Positive By 2030

It’s probably easiest to start with the second claim first. Water positivity is defined as facilities returning more water to the environment than they consume, via measures including rainwater capture or other treating wastewater for reuse.

The latest post gives several examples of how Amazon is doing this in some locations, such as a project in Oregon where the company is funding a project to remove water from the Columbia River during peak winter flows and store it in an aquifer for use during drier parts of the year.

Presumably Amazon bases its 75% calculation on the announcement of over 50 water projects which are ‘expected’ to return more than 5.8 billion gallons of water annually for use by local communities.

The word ‘expected’ could be doing some heavy lifting in that sentence, and what also is not specified is whether the ‘local communities’ cited are the same communities in which Amazon’s datacenters have been constructed.

For example, Amazon’s agreement earlier this year to pay $20.5 million to settle allegations that a large datacenter in Morrow County, Ore., contributed to nitrate pollution that has contaminated local groundwater supplies is, oddly enough, absent from the discussion.

Amazon also deploys the same narrative devices as its competitors do in their reporting by taking the absolute volume of water consumed and comparing it to volumes used domestically on lawns and golf courses. It isn’t necessarily inaccurate, but it serves to trivialize and downplay its own consumption.

Are Amazon Datacenters More Efficient?

In summary, yes and by no small margin.

Amazon announced that, in 2025, its global datacenter operations have a Water Unit Efficiency (WUE) of 0.12 litres. This means that Amazon consumes 0.12 litres of water per kilowatt-hour (L/kWh) of power consumed.

The data I have for the most recent round of sustainability reporting is from 2024, but Amazon’s claim does, well, hold water. For FY24 Microsoft published a WUE of 0.3(L/kWh) and Google’s stood at a terrifying 1.1 (L/kWh).

Amazon has published its WUE for a couple of years now as a comparative metric. When asked for information on consumption it has always refused to publish this figure, arguing that, as a hyperscaler, it’s obviously going to consume a lot of water, but should be judged on how efficiently it does so.

But whilst efficiency matters, so does the complete water footprint. It matters in the same way as carbon footprint matters in the sense that consumers and potential consumers of these services have the right to understand how supplier activity affects their own environmental footprint. And any business as large as Amazon should be accountable for how its activities affect the environment in which it operates.

In comparison to other hyperscalers with broadly similar datacenter capacity, in terms of water consumption Amazon comes out at the lower end of the scale. Amazon copies Google and provides a number in gallons rather than litres – presumably because it’s lower. 2.5 billion US gallons is equal to 9,463.53 megalitres (ML). For comparison, in FY24, Microsoft’s consumption stood at 5,807ML and Google’s at a whopping 30,796ML. Meta’s water consumption in the year was 3,123ML.

Amazon’s water consumption is therefore higher than its immediate datacenter peers but remains a fraction of that of Google’s datacenters.

Credit Where It’s Due

Amazon deserves credit for finally publishing an absolute water consumption figure. The data confirms that its datacenters are among the most water-efficient in the hyperscale sector and that its overall consumption remains well below Google's.

But transparency alone is not enough. Claims of being ‘water positive’ still rely heavily on future projects and offsetting measures, while efficiency metrics can distract from the reality that Amazon consumes billions of gallons of water each year. As datacenter expansion continues, key questions remain on not just how efficiently water is used, but what impact that use has on the communities and ecosystems where it is extracted.

This article originally appeared on MES Computing’s sister site Computing.