Amazon has disclosed for the first time that its global data centre operations consumed approximately 2.5 billion gallons or more than 9 billion litres of water in 2025. The announcement comes as data centre operators face growing scrutiny over the environmental impact of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, with the company simultaneously positioning itself as the most water-efficient major cloud provider in the world.
The figures were published in a company blog post, in which Amazon reported that water use at the sites it directly owns and operates fell by two per cent compared to 2024 levels, even as the overall scale of its data centre footprint continued to expand.
Amazon Discloses 9 Billion Litres Of Data Centre Water Use In 2025, Claims Industry-Leading Efficiency
Water used by AI companies to cool their data centres. (Image Credit: Amazon)
How Amazon compares to rivals
Amazon shared a comparative chart in the same blog post, claiming its data centres used just 0.12 litres of water per kilowatt-hour (L/kWh) of electricity in 2025, the lowest figure among major cloud operators including Microsoft, Google, and Meta.
However, the comparison has drawn scrutiny. Amazon's figures cover its entire operations, whereas Google's figures cited in the chart reportedly reflect water consumption only at its Gemini AI data centres, workloads that typically consume significantly more water owing to the high-power GPUs involved. Tech outlet reports have also noted that Amazon's disclosed figures exclude water used during the construction of new data centre facilities, as well as water consumed by the power plants supplying electricity to those sites.
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Amazon Discloses 9 Billion Litres Of Data Centre Water Use In 2025, Claims Industry-Leading Efficiency
Amazon claims to use water for cooling only 10 per cent of the hours each year in data centers using their direct evaporative design. (Image Credit: Amazon)
Growing Public and Regulatory Pressure
The disclosure arrives at a sensitive moment for the industry. Seattle, Amazon's home city, recently imposed a one-year moratorium on new data centre construction, a move that had also been called for by some Amazon employees. A Reuters poll concluding on June 8 found that only one in three Americans supported data centre construction in general, with just 14 per cent willing to have one built near their home.
The broader picture is equally concerning. The United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health estimates that the global water footprint of data centres could reach 9.3 trillion litres by 2030, a volume sufficient to meet the annual domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa.
A leaked internal memo from 2022 previously estimated that Amazon's own data centres would consume 7.7 billion gallons of water annually by 2030. The company has not publicly commented on that projection.
In response to concerns over the scale of its water consumption, Amazon has sought to contextualise the figures. The company noted that Americans use approximately 3.3 trillion gallons of water each year on lawns and gardens alone, a figure more than 1,300 times greater than the water consumed across all of its data centres in 2025.
Amazon currently operates approximately 924 data centres worldwide, and has committed to becoming water positive by 2030, meaning it aims to return more water to communities than it consumes in its operations.
