Amazon Discloses 2.5B Gallons of Data-Center Water Use in 2025

Amazon has finally put a number on it, reporting to the Wall Street Journal that its global data-center operations withdrew about 2.5 billion gallons of water in 2025. That is the company's first public accounting of its total data-center water consumption, and it lands as operators worldwide face growing scrutiny over the environmental cost of the AI buildout.

For context, Google reported roughly 6.4 billion gallons across its data centers in 2023, Microsoft about 1.7 billion gallons (up around 34% year over year), and Meta about 813 million. Amazon's disclosure lands in the middle of that pack and comes with an efficiency pitch, the company saying it used 0.12 liters per kilowatt-hour compared with an industry average it cites at 0.84. It also says it is 75% of the way toward a 2030 goal of replenishing more water than it draws, through more than 50 announced projects.

The reason this matters for anyone tracking AI infrastructure is that water has moved from a footnote in sustainability reports into the specific lever local officials are pulling to slow new builds. A Bloomberg News analysis found roughly two-thirds of data centers built or in development in the US since 2022 sit in places already gripped by high water stress, with more than 160 new AI sites in the past three years landing in areas with scarce water resources. That is the political backdrop Amazon's number is landing into.

The honest caveat is that an aggregate global figure is exactly the kind of number that can obscure the more uncomfortable local one. What the reporting does not give you is a site-by-site breakdown, or an accounting of the offsite water used to generate the electricity the servers consume, which is generally treated as a separate scope from the on-site cooling that shows up in these totals. Efficiency ratios like liters per kilowatt-hour are useful, but they do not tell a town in Arizona or Iowa how much of its aquifer is being drawn down this year.

What is worth watching from here is whether Amazon's move raises the disclosure baseline for the rest of the industry, and whether the next round of shareholder resolutions and city-council fights forces site-level numbers into the open. The direction of travel is set; the question is how granular the reporting gets, and how fast.