Amazon says its data centers are 7x more water-efficient than industry average
Amazon announced its data centers are seven times more water-efficient than the industry average, consuming about 2.5 billion gallons globally last year, a claim made shortly after a UN University report highlighted the significant environmental footprint of data centers. The tech giant aims to be water positive by 2030, returning more water than it uses to communities where it operates. This transparency initiative comes amidst growing concerns over data center resource consumption.
Amazon announced that its data centers are seven times more water-efficient than the industry average, reporting a consumption of approximately 2.5 billion gallons globally last year. This figure, according to Amazon, represents about 5% of the annual water usage in the entire metro Seattle area, with most of the water used for cooling server farms supporting Amazon Web Services.
This disclosure follows a United Nations University report that detailed the environmental footprint of data centers, noting their electricity consumption rivals that of some of the world's largest countries. Joern Tinnemeyer, an Amazon data center engineering leader, emphasized the company's focus on thermal management to efficiently remove heat generated by computing operations.
Amazon claims a 52% improvement in water efficiency since 2021, with its global data center operations using 0.12 liters of water per kilowatt-hour (L/kWh) last year. For comparison, other tech giants like Meta, Microsoft, and Google reported higher L/kWh figures in recent years. Amazon is releasing its water-usage data to increase transparency and states it is 75% of the way to its goal of being water positive by 2030, with over 50 water projects expected to return more than 5.8 billion gallons annually to communities.
The UN University report highlighted that global data centers used 448 trillion watt-hours of electricity last year, producing about 208 million tons of carbon dioxide and consuming approximately 1.2 trillion gallons of water. The report projects that by 2030, data centers could account for nearly 3% of the world's projected electricity use, largely driven by AI demand.