If you hang out in any even vaguely AI-skeptical parts of the Internet, you’ve probably stumbled on plenty of memes and posts premised on data centers’ insatiable thirst for water to power evaporative cooling. But a new report from Amazon highlights just how little water all these AI data centers are using in aggregate, on a relative basis, even as individual data centers can strain local water supplies.
In a Thursday blog post, Amazon claims its data centers withdrew “about 2.5 billion gallons” globally in 2025. That number sounds incredibly large at first glance, but it looks downright puny compared to the 117 trillion gallons of water withdrawn in the US alone in 2015. It’s also useful to compare Amazon’s number to stats from more water-intensive areas, from the 3.3 trillion gallons used annually on US lawns and landscaping to the 1.3 trillion gallons a year used in California almond orchards to the 531 billion gallons a year used just for US golf courses.
Amazon is just one company, of course, and a relative latecomer to reporting its data center water usage numbers. Google data centers withdrew about more than 6.1 billion gallons of water in 2024, on top of about 2.75 billion gallons from Microsoft and about 1.4 billion gallons from Meta in the same year.
All told, a 2021 Nature study estimates that all US data centers combined consumed about 163 billion gallons of water that year, a number that includes “indirect” consumption from non-renewable power sources. That number has doubtlessly increased in the AI-driven years since that study was published—one analysis estimates that Texas data centers alone used 25 to 49 billion gallons in 2024, and could grow to withdraw 399 billion gallons in 2030. But even annual data center water usage measured in the trillions would represent a figurative (and kind of literal) drop in the bucket compared to national and worldwide water usage statistics.
That kind of concentrated water use can put severe strain on local infrastructure and water supplies, and has led to at least one situation where a data center siphoned millions of gallons from local sources without initially paying. The local impacts can be especially severe in areas that are already water-stressed; a 2025 Business Insider report found that 40 percent of planned and existing data centers in the US are in areas with “high” or “extremely high” water scarcity, as measured by the World Resources Institute.
a new report from Amazon
Hahahaha
“If you just compare one single business in an industry to entire industries that people have complained about wasting water, this one is nothing!”
fuck this greenwashing bullshit headline
This is greenwashing straight from Amazon’s PR department.
I tend to trust Ars. Consider the source. Though I fully expected a response like this.
The source is literally Amazon, it’s like the second sentence of the post.
Amazon provides their own numbers, and the rest is reported. The hed is not Amazon’s. It’s called sourcing.
Look, I’m not a fan of “AI,” but I do care about the quality of reporting, and Kyle is solid. I know it’s en vogue to immediately bash anything that’s not flaming vitriol, but learn some media literacy instead of just having a knee-jerk reaction because Amazon is a source. That’s going to happen when covering Amazon. Where else do you expect to get those data?
Let’s say this is total horseshit, which it may well be. Do the other figures provided still tell the same story assuming Amazon is understating water use by an order of magnitude? Yep. If all you care about is water use, railing against golf courses and calling for an end to lawn watering is going to be more effective.
If all you care about is AMAZON BAD, then your response makes sense.
Ars Technica, owned by Conde Nast and The Wired Group, both of which are owned by Advance Publications, is a zionist pro-billionaire propaganda outlet.
Fun fact, the owner of Advance Publications, officially listed as “the Newhouse Family,” also has a majority share in reddit and sits on its board of directors. In case you might be wondering where you got your bias towards it.
elon musk’s xai in memphis (grok) is using 1.5 million gallons of water per day for cooling.
he is pulling the water from the drinking water aquifer, using it to cool his tiny dick computer and then dumping the waste water in the mississippi.
he is not wasting regular ground water, it is 1500 year old memphis sands aquifer water that tastes amazing.
he promised to build a water treatment plant to use greywater instead, but halted that construction project because reasons.
fuck elon. fuck xai.
please do not use grok.
because reasons
Money. The reason is always money.
even as individual data centers can strain local water supplies
Isn’t this the main problem. Doesn’t matter what they use in aggregate if most places dont have a data center what matters is the area around the data centers
The people trying to profit from AI really want us to focus on the water usage because they have these rebuttals ready to go.
Notice they don’t have one for the power consumption, pollution, noise, or any other drain local resources.
I am also curious if this water figure includes water for generators that are often used to power the things, or just “the data center part.”
Water use is probably a drop in the bucket, but the electrical use sure as hell isn’t.
We’re supposed to be curbing fossil fuel use, instead we’re burning our way to hell to mint trillionaires.
But it’s not a drop in the bucket… They try to claim it is, by comparing their usage from 2-4 years ago, which has exponentially increased over the last 18 months, to national or global usage, but they completely gloss over;
A single Meta data center in Newton County, Georgia, for instance, now uses about 10 percent of the entire county’s water supply
This is a shit article, from what’s clear to be a shit author Kyle Orland, Ars’ Senior Gaming Editor.
This is a shit article, from what’s clear to be a shit author Kyle Orland, Ars’ Senior Gaming Editor.
Yea agreed - though it does make an important point (in perhaps the opposite way it should have been made). Local water use is being impacted greatly - it may not lead to us having no water nationally, but its absolutely leading local communities to struggle to get people water.
it may not lead to us having no water nationally,
Water is distributed at the local level in the US, so this is just a made up metric that will never be met. Unless they build this shit in every town in the US.
I mean it kinda is but you’re right that any increases are pretty inconveniently timed.
I’m concerned about the pollution and noise issue. They seem to disrupt the local ecosystem as well as people living around them terribly.
So does every city, suburb, town, factory, mine, processing plant, farm, etc.
That’s hardly a datacenter specific issue.
So does every city, suburb, town, factory, mine, processing plant, farm, etc.
What you’re missing is that all these things provide economic benefits locally.
A datacentre uses prodigious amounts of local resources, but doesn’t provide much in the way of local returns. It’s very much a case of “privatise the profits, socialise the losses” for the locals.
You’re not really correct with that statement.
Most large farms produce almost no local benefit. They don’t buy supplies locally, or sell the product locally, and these days they don’t employ that many people either.
Datacenters are not empty, they still employ people after being built.
I didn’t post because I think all is fine and dandy, but what I’m gathering is the issue is local moreso than aggregate. People are up in arms in Temple over planned bit barns.
Add to that:
In the U.S. in 2020, an average of 11,857 gallons of water was used per megawatt-hour of electricity produced.
https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/how-much-water-our-electricity-uses
For Amazon, “data suggests that in 2023, colocation data centers used by AWS alone used more than 7.8 million megawatt hours of electricity, around a fifth of the company’s total power.” https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/aws-has-more-than-900-data-centers-report/
92 more billion gallons of water at 7.8 million megawatt hours. (That’s about a fifth of the company’s total power, so it’s more like 450 billion gallons)
And that’s just Amazon.
This seems like a bullshit article using old data. But let’s take it at face value for the sake of argument.
Perhaps we should prioritize water given to humans (which they require to live).
Data centers have contaminated local water supplies, and often have a priority for access to free water.
The question isn’t exactly the amount of water it takes to power “ai”. The real question is if we are actually aware of the cost for something which is not actually required to solve the problems of the world.
Yes, it seems like an “everyone else is wasting water so why shouldn’t we” argument.
If i were in a drought prone area and there were golf courses watering all the time then I’d hope people would complain about that too.
I’m pretty sure a major problem with AI is that people don’t know how to talk about the actual problem.
It’s mega-corps replacing people while “stealing” their intellectual output. It’s a reshaping of the “social contract”. It’s those making bank quickly pushing the whole world in a direction that may just be a really bad idea (like we’re no longer in control of our own world/lives at all).
It poses the question: is all tech progress good or is it sometimes “bad” such that we actually want to design our own fate and sometimes just be comfortable with what we have and what we are?
Does this whole post-industrial revolution world need techno-hype to be happy? Or can we collectively just touch grass and settle a bit more.
