Amazon strategised about keeping its datacentres’ full water use secret, leaked document showsExecutives at world’s biggest datacenter owner...
Published on by Water Network Research, Official research team of The Water Network
Executives at world’s biggest datacenter owner grappled with disclosing information about water used to help power facilities
Luke Barratt and Rosa Furneaux
Sat 25 Oct 2025 12.00 CEST
Share
Amazon strategised about keeping the public in the dark over the true extent of its datacentres’ water use, a leaked internal document reveals.
The biggest owner of datacentres in the world, Amazon dwarfs competitors Microsoft and Google and is planning a huge increase in capacity as part of a push into artificial intelligence. The Seattle firm operates hundreds of active facilities, with many more in development despite concerns over how much water is being used to cool their vast arrays of circuitry.
Amazon defends its approach and has taken steps to manage how efficient its water use is, but it has faced criticism over transparency. Microsoft and Google regularly publish figures for their water consumption, but Amazon has never publicly disclosed how much water its server farms consume.
When designing a campaign for water efficiency, the company’s cloud computing division chose to account for only a smaller water usage figure that does not include all the ways its datacentres use water so as to minimise the risk to its reputation, according to a leaked memo seen by SourceMaterial and the Guardian.
Amazon as a whole consumed 105bn gallons of water in total in 2021, as much as 958,000 US households, which would make for a city bigger than San Francisco, according to the memo.
Asked about the leaked document, Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan described it as “obsolete” and said it “completely misrepresents Amazon’s current water usage strategy”.
A Spanish city surrounded by dry land, with a grib superimposed on it.
Revealed: Big tech’s new datacentres will take water from the world’s driest areas
Read more
“A document’s existence doesn’t guarantee its accuracy or finality,” she said. “Meetings often reshape documents or reveal flawed findings or claims.” Callahan would not elaborate on which strategic elements of the document were “obsolete”.
The memo was dated one month before Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud computing division, debuted a new sustainability campaign in November 2022 called “Water Positive”, with a commitment to “return more water than it uses” by 2030.
Attached link
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/25/amazon-datacentres-water-use-disclosureTaxonomy
- Water Efficiency
- Wastewater Use
- IT
- artificial intelligence
- Water Efficiency
- Domestic Water Use
- United States