Simply after Seattle enacted a one-year data center moratorium that a few of Amazon’s personal staff pushed for, Amazon shared how a lot water its information facilities use, reportedly for the primary time. With issues about water consumption and energy use a spotlight of recent AI information middle development debates, Amazon says its world information middle operations consumed 2.5 billion gallons of water in 2025 at a fee of 0.12 liters per kilowatt-hour of electrical energy, dropping by two % from its 2024 complete even because it expanded operations.
Amazon additionally claims it’s utilizing water extra effectively than some Huge Tech rivals — this graphic in Amazon’s report factors to Microsoft, Google, and Meta information exhibiting every utilizing extra water per kilowatt-hour than Amazon did over the previous few years.
Google by far used probably the most; nonetheless, it seems the information cited is concentrated particularly on Gemini AI datacenters, whereas Amazon is reporting on all of its operations. Nonetheless, Amazon’s information doesn’t think about oblique water utilization on the energy crops offering electrical energy for its information facilities, or issues like water use from new information middle development.
Amazon says that “about 90 % of the time” its information facilities use air cooling, and makes use of evaporative water cooling on “the most well liked hours of the most well liked days,” whereas additionally elevating its servers’ tolerances for warmth. Amazon claims its information facilities are seven instances extra water-efficient than the trade common, based mostly on an adjusted quantity from a peer-reviewed research paper launched final yr.
