Amazon admits its data centres used 2.5Bn gallons of water in 2025

AMAZON said its data centres used 2.5 billion gallons of water in 2025, a decrease from the year prior.

On Thursday, June 10, the company said most of the water is used to cool the servers that power its data centres, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company said its water use declined by 2% from the previous year, despite continuing to expand its operations.

The company said it has improved the efficiency of its cooling systems and uses water-based cooling only when needed during the hotter months.

Amazon has a total of more than 900 data centres in over 50 countries, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg last November.

The data comes as demands grow for transparency around data centre water use.

In Oregon, the city of The Dalles agreed to release records detailing how much water the city was using for Google's data centres, following a lengthy legal battle, according to Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, Utah recently passed what is believed to be the nation's first law requiring certain new data centre developments to publicly disclose their annual water usage, the outlet reported.

"We need more transparency," Iris Stewart-Frey, a professor of environmental science at Santa Clara University and lead author of a report examining California's data centre water use, told Bloomberg.

"Then communities will actually know what they're getting into and can evaluate the costs and benefits, because the situation is very different from locality to locality."

Kerry Person, an Amazon Web Services vice president who oversees data centre operations, argued that the company's newly released figures tell a different story than what headlines suggest.

"If you look at the press right now, the data centre industry is apparently consuming all of the water in the world," Person said in an interview with Bloomberg. "When you actually look at the data and look at the details, nothing could be further from the truth."

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A six-day poll that concluded on Monday, June 8, revealed one in three Americans approve of data centre construction, according to Reuters.

Of the 4,531 people across the country who were surveyed, only 14% said they were okay with a centre being built near them, the outlet reported.