Amazon strategised about keeping its datacentres' full water use secret, leaked document shows

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/25/amazon-datacentres-
water-use-disclosure

Amazon strategised about keeping the public in the dark over the true 
extent of its datacentres’ water use, a leaked internal document reveals.

The biggest owner of datacentres in the world, Amazon dwarfs competitors 
Microsoft and Google and is planning a huge increase in capacity as part 
of a push into artificial intelligence. The Seattle firm operates hundreds 
of active facilities, with many more in development despite concerns over 
how much water is being used to cool their vast arrays of circuitry.

Amazon defends its approach and has taken steps to manage how efficient 
its water use is, but it has faced criticism over transparency. Microsoft 
and Google regularly publish figures for their water consumption, but 
Amazon has never publicly disclosed how much water its server farms 
consume.

When designing a campaign for water efficiency, the company’s cloud 
computing division chose to account for only a smaller water usage figure 
that does not include all the ways its datacentres use water so as to 
minimise the risk to its reputation, according to a leaked memo seen by 
SourceMaterial and the Guardian.

Amazon as a whole used 10.5bn gallons (39.7bn litres) of water in total in 
2021, more than 95,000 US households.

Asked about the leaked document, an Amazon spokesperson, Margaret 
Callahan, described it as “obsolete” and said it “completely misrepresents 
Amazon’s current water usage strategy”.

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“A document’s existence doesn’t guarantee its accuracy or finality,” she 
said. “Meetings often reshape documents or reveal flawed findings or 
claims.” Callahan would not elaborate on which strategic elements of the 
document were “obsolete”.

The memo was dated one month before Amazon Web Services (AWS), the 
company’s cloud computing division, debuted a new sustainability campaign 
in November 2022 called “Water Positive”, with a commitment to “return 
more water than it uses” by 2030.

In the memo, ahead of the campaign’s launch, executives grappled with 
whether to include public disclosures about “secondary” use – water used 
in generating the electricity to power its datacentres.

They warned that full transparency was “a one-way door” and advised 
keeping AWS’s projections confidential, even as they feared that their 
advice could invite accusations of a cover-up. “Amazon hides its water 
consumption” was one negative headline the authors anticipated.

Callahan said efficiency savings had already been achieved and pointed out 
that other companies also don’t count secondary water use: “The truth is, 
we’ve gotten 40% more efficient in our data center water use since 2021, 
and we used less potable water for cooling operations in data centers 
globally in 2024 than we did in 2023.”

Executives opted to use only the relatively smaller figure of primary use, 
7.7bn gallons per year, roughly equivalent to 11,600 Olympic swimming 
pools, when calculating progress towards internal targets because of 
“reputational risk”, fearing bad publicity if the full scale of Amazon’s 
consumption was revealed, the document shows. Ultimately as part of the 
campaign for water efficiency, Amazon aimed to cut its estimated 7.7bn 
gallon primary consumption to 4.9bn by 2030 – without addressing secondary 
use.

Using the higher of two water usage estimates, the one that would include 
secondary use, “would double the size and budget” of the campaign “without 
addressing meaningful operational, regulatory or reputational risks”, they 
warned, adding that there was “no focus from customers or media” on water 
used for electricity.

“We may decide to release water volumes in the future,” the document said. 
“But … we should only do so if the lack of data undermines the programme 
or is required by regulators.”

Scientists balked at the selective disclosure and the choice not to 
include secondary use of water in the total.

“In environmental science, it is standard practice to include both to more 
accurately capture the true water cost of datacentres,” said Shaolei Ren, 
associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the 
University of California, Riverside.

Amazon’s Water Positive campaign is still active and does not take into 
account secondary use, while the company continues to keep its current 
overall water consumption confidential.

As US tech companies ride the wave of AI investment and pursue greater 
heights of computational power, the $2.4tn corporation is building new 
datacentres in some of the world’s driest areas, SourceMaterial and the 
Guardian revealed in April.

Feeling water positive
In November 2022, AWS debuted its new Water Positive sustainability 
campaign, with a commitment to “return more water than it uses by 2030”. 
The campaign only applies to AWS. The wider Amazon group, including the 
world’s biggest online retail business, has an overall water consumption 
that is far higher, 105bn gallons per year.

“The models referenced in this document were preliminary and unvetted,” 
said Amazon’s Callahan, who declined to provide any alternative figures.

The document’s authors advised the company not to release data about the 
wider company, but they also warned that selective disclosure could lead 
to accusations of a cover-up. There was “reputational risk of publicly 
committing to a goal for only a portion of Amazon’s direct water 
footprint”, they wrote. They even suggested negative headlines that might 
result including “Amazon disappoints, failing to take full responsibility 
for water”.

“It would be better if they could own up to it,” said a current Amazon 
software developer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. 
“Even if they said it was a low priority, at least that would be honest.”

In a sustainability report in August, AWS claimed it had achieved 53% of 
its Water Positive goal. The division’s plan for reaching the target 
relies mostly on “water replenishment” projects, some in partnership with 
Water.org, a non-profit organisation co-founded by the actor Matt Damon. 
The strategy document refers to these projects as “offsets”, describing 
initiatives like using Amazon computer technology to help utilities 
prioritise which pipes to fix in order to minimise leaks.

But of the $109m AWS planned to spend on offsets, about half would have 
been spent anyway, either to meet regulatory requirements or because the 
projects would help AWS operations by making water more available, the 
document shows. Experts said this amounted to incomplete accounting.

“Regardless of what sort of offsetting or replenishment you do, it doesn’t 
necessarily nullify the water footprints of your own operations,” said 
Tyler Farrow, standards manager at the Alliance for Water Stewardship. 
“Calling your operations water positive or water neutral is misleading.”

Amazon’s Callahan said that the “replenishment spending”, which other tech 
companies also undertake, is a voluntary, not a regulatory, requirement.

“We’ve expanded well beyond what was imagined in the document because it’s 
the right thing to do for the world and for the communities in which we 
operate,” she said.

‘Obfuscate the water footprint’
Amazon is also engineering industry standards to downplay its water use 
and avert scrutiny, said Nathan Wangusi, a former water sustainability 
manager at the company.

The corporation has funded efforts by the Nature Conservancy and the World 
Resources Institute non-profits, alongside LimnoTech, a consultancy, “to 
create a globally accepted methodology for quantifying the benefit of 
watershed restoration projects”.

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Responding to questions from SourceMaterial, all three organisations 
defended their integrity and independence, insisting that Amazon had no 
undue influence on any methodologies they had created.

“They spend a lot of time creating methodologies that are used to 
obfuscate the water footprint,” Wangusi said, referring to Amazon.

Callahan said Wangusi’s claim was “contradicted by facts”. “Amazon’s water 
use reporting is based on third-party assured data from actual utility 
bills, not estimates or self-reporting,” she said. Wangusi’s claim, 
though, was not about Amazon’s water-use reporting, but about measuring 
the effects of water offsets.

Callahan said these efforts were “standard practice” and that Amazon’s 
“customers expect us to hold ourselves accountable to credible guidance 
and best practices”.

As well as choosing not to disclose water use from electricity generation, 
Amazon has estimated its larger “indirect” water footprint, the document 
shows. This extra usage, which falls under a classification known as 
“scope 3”, includes water for production and construction – in Amazon’s 
case, mostly irrigation of cotton plantations supplying its fashion 
brands, and vegetables for its grocery arm, Amazon Fresh.

Here, too, Amazon decided to keep its consumption confidential, even 
though “indirect water use represents roughly 90% of Amazon’s total water 
footprint”, according to the document.

AWS avoided establishing targets for indirect water use because that 
figure would be “much more significant for the rest of Amazon, especially 
in the agricultural supply chain, and the team does not want to establish 
a standard for addressing scope 3 water use that the rest of Amazon would 
need to follow, given the larger resource implications”, the authors 
wrote.

“You don’t need to obscure or obfuscate,” said Wangusi, who believes he 
was “hounded out” of Amazon for criticising the company’s approach. 
(Amazon declined to comment on his departure.)

“It doesn’t make you more profitable,” he said. “It makes you less 
trustworthy.”

 This article was amended on 30 October 2025 to correct the amount of 
water Amazon as a whole used in 2021. It is 10.5bn gallons, according to 
the internal company memo, not 105bn.


-- 
November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump.  We look 
forward to America being great again.

We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that 
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Thank you for cleaning up the disasters of the 2008-2017, 2020-2024 Obama 
/ Biden / Harris fiascos, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the 
The World According To Garp.  Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood 
queer liberal democrat donors.