Amazon’s data centers used 2.5 billion gallons of water last year

Just after Seattle enacted a one-year data center moratorium that some of Amazon’s own employees pushed for, Amazon shared how much water its data centers use, reportedly for the first time. With concerns about water consumption and energy use a focus of new AI data center construction debates, Amazon says its global data center operations consumed 2.5 billion gallons of water in 2025 at a rate of 0.12 liters per kilowatt-hour of electricity, dropping by two percent from its 2024 total even as it expanded operations.

Amazon finally released annual water usage data and claims it’s actually more efficient than the others.

Amazon also claims it’s using water more efficiently than some Big Tech rivals — this graphic in Amazon’s report points to Microsoft, Google, and Meta data showing each using more water per kilowatt-hour than Amazon did over the past few years.

Google by far used the most; however, it appears the data cited is focused specifically on Gemini AI datacenters, while Amazon is reporting on all of its operations. However, Amazon’s data doesn’t factor in indirect water usage at the power plants providing electricity for its data centers, or things like water use from new data center construction.

Amazon says that “about 90 percent of the time” its data centers use air cooling, and uses evaporative water cooling on “the hottest hours of the hottest days,” while also raising its servers’ tolerances for heat. Amazon claims its data centers are seven times more water-efficient than the industry average, based on an adjusted number from a peer-reviewed research paper released last year.