Amazon says its data centers are 7x more water-efficient than industry average

Shortly after a United Nations University report revealed the environmental footprint of data centers already rivals that of some of the world’s largest countries, Amazon revealed its data centers are seven times more water-efficient than the industry average.

Amazon claimed its data centers consumed around 2.5 billion gallons of water globally last year — approximately 5% of what the entire metro Seattle area uses annually. Most of that water goes toward cooling massive server farms behind Amazon Web Services.

“Data centers enable everything from video calls to virtual medical visits and education to online banking,” Joern Tinnemeyer, a data center engineering leader at Amazon, said in a prepared statement. “To deliver that computing reliably, we need to maintain optimal temperatures. My team focuses on thermal management — taking the heat generated as a byproduct of computing operations and removing it as effectively and as efficiently as possible.”

The tech giant has had a 52% improvement in water efficiency since 2021. Amazon’s global data center operations used 0.12 liters of water per kilowatt-hour (L/kWh) last year. In comparison, Meta used 0.19 liters of water per kilowatt-hour in 2024, Microsoft used 0.27 in 2025, and Google used 1.15 in 2024.

Amazon said it’s releasing its water-usage data to increase transparency.

“We’re 75% of the way to our goal of being water positive by 2030, meaning that for every gallon of water we use in our data center operations, we will return more than a gallon back to the communities where we operate,” Alex Davies, senior editor at Amazon News, stated. “In 2025, we returned 3 gallons for every 4 we used—and we’ve announced over 50 water projects that are expected to return more than 5.8 billion gallons annually once fully implemented.”

Energy, water use, and pollution of AI and data centers rival most countries

Last year, global data centers used 448 trillion watt-hours of electricity, more than all but 10 countries of the world, the United Nations University report stated. That electricity use produced about 208 million tons (189 million metric tons) of carbon dioxide, about the same amount as Argentina, and producing that much energy consumed about 1.2 trillion gallons (4.5 trillion liters) of water, according to the report on the environmental consequences of AI’s energy use.

By 2030, data centers will account for nearly 3% of the world’s projected electricity use, with 935 trillion watt-hours. If data centers were a country, the country would be projected to rank sixth-highest in power use in 2030. That would produce nearly 440 million tons (399 million metric tons) of carbon dioxide, the report said. The study focused on energy use and didn’t examine the massive amount of water used to cool data centers.

“If you look at these numbers, we’re seeing scales comparable to nations,” said study co-author Kaveh Madani, a water scientist and director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health in Canada. “The demand is enormous.”

Much of the growth of data centers is being driven by AI. About 20% of data centers’ energy is currently due to AI, but that should grow to 40% by 2030, the report said.

Contributing: The Associated Press

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