Amazon disclosed 2.5 billion gallons of data center water use this week, a figure the company said was its first annual release of the kind. The efficiency benchmark it chose to publicize rests on a peer reviewed paper and a comparison set Amazon selected itself.
Amazon said its data centers used 2.5 billion gallons of water in 2025, a figure the company framed as its first annual disclosure of the kind. The number is real and worth taking seriously. The comparison Amazon built around it is one the company picked for itself.
The same disclosure pegs water intensity at 0.12 liters per kilowatt-hour, down 2% from 2024 even as Amazon's footprint expanded. Amazon used the release to claim it is 7x more water-efficient than the industry average. That benchmark comes from an adjusted figure in a single peer-reviewed paper, not from a neutral cross-operator ledger. The Google data point Amazon cites in its comparison graphic appears to be scoped to Gemini AI datacenters only, while Amazon's number covers its entire global operation. The asymmetry is Amazon's choice, and its own chart flags the scoping gap.
The disclosure also leaves out categories a reader would want before calling the number complete. Indirect water use at the power plants supplying Amazon's electricity is not in the figure, and neither is the water used in constructing new data centers. On the operations side, Amazon says it air-cools facilities about 90% of the time and reserves evaporative cooling for the hottest hours, alongside raised server heat tolerances. Both the omissions and the cooling method are part of why the company is comfortable putting a number on the page.
The timing is the frame that matters. The release landed in the same week Seattle enacted a one-year moratorium on new data centers, a pause some Amazon employees had publicly urged, as reported by Stevie Bonifield for The Verge. Local jurisdictions from Phoenix to Loudoun County are being asked to weigh new construction against water and electric-grid strain, and Amazon is the first hyperscaler to hand the public a year-long water number to argue with. Whether the benchmark and the omissions hold up to outside auditing is the question the next round of disclosures, from Amazon and from the rest of the field, will have to answer.