Amazon Data Centres Achieve 7x Industry-Leading Water Efficiency at 0.12 Litres per Kilowatt-Hour as Water Positive Goal Reaches 75% Progress

Amazon has announced that its global data centre operations used just 0.12 litres of water per kilowatt-hour in 2025, more than seven times more efficient than the industry average of 0.84 litres per kilowatt-hour, representing a 52 percent improvement in water efficiency since 2021. The company is 75 percent of the way toward its goal of being water positive by 2030, having returned three gallons for every four used in 2025, with more than 50 water projects announced that are expected to return more than 5.8 billion gallons annually once fully implemented. Amazon already operates 26 facilities using 100 percent reclaimed water sourced from wastewater treatment plants rather than drinking water supplies, more than any other cloud provider, with 130 more contracted globally across markets including Mississippi, Hong Kong and Indonesia where Amazon has helped create reclaimed water programmes from the ground up.

 

The Cooling Technology Behind Water Efficiency

 

Amazon's data centre cooling system achieves its water efficiency through a deliberate architecture that uses free air cooling for approximately 90 percent of operating hours, pulling in outside air, running it past servers to absorb heat and pumping it back outside without any water involvement. Only during the hottest hours of the hottest days does the system switch to evaporative cooling, in which water is sprayed onto an absorbent medium and hot air flows through the water-soaked material, causing evaporation that cools incoming air by five to ten degrees. Joern Tinnemeyer, a data centre engineering leader at Amazon, said the company set an ambitious target that benefits customers, iterated relentlessly and validated with data, ultimately proving it could cut water use in half without any impact on performance.

A key innovation enabling the efficiency improvement has been progressively raising the temperature thresholds at which Amazon's data centres operate, designing servers to tolerate more heat and thereby reducing the number of hours water cooling is needed. Amazon now uses water to cool incoming air only when ambient temperatures exceed approximately 85 degrees Fahrenheit, making the system water-efficient across most global climates. Amazon engineers compared two identical data centres on the same campus and achieved approximately 50 percent less water use in the facility running at higher temperatures, while in Northern Virginia, the company's largest region by IT load, water use dropped 42 percent year-over-year even as computing demand continued to grow.

 

Read more: FPT and Amata Group Sign MOU to Drive AI Transformation and Sustainability Across Southeast Asian Industrial Parks

 

The Water Positive Commitment and Community Investment

 

Amazon's commitment to being water positive by 2030 means returning more water to communities than is consumed across all data centre operations globally, a target that goes substantially beyond efficiency improvement into active water stewardship and community benefit. In 2025, the company withdrew approximately 2.5 billion gallons across its entire global data centre footprint for the full year, a figure that decreased 2 percent from 2024 to 2025 even as the number of buildings continued to grow. Water specialist Beau Schilz, who spent years in water utilities before joining Amazon, said the company is particularly focused on areas of water scarcity and wants to partner with communities to ensure water stewardship creates the local benefits communities want to see.

Specific water return projects illustrate the scope and creativity of Amazon's approach. In Hermiston, Oregon, the company is funding a project to pull water from the Columbia River during peak winter flows and store it in an aquifer for use during drier periods. In northeastern Spain, Amazon worked with environmental consultancy Mediodes on a pipeline that moves runoff water from upstream fields to a poplar grove in Pina del Ebro, reducing the need to draw irrigation water from the Ebro River. Near Guadalajara, Mexico, a watershed restoration project is helping the ground absorb more rainwater and preventing pollution from flowing into the Santiago River basin, combining ecological restoration with water availability improvement for local communities.

 

The Broader Data Centre Water Use Context

 

The data centre industry as a whole accounts for less than 0.5 percent of all global industrial water use, a figure that provides important context for understanding the scale of the challenge relative to other water-intensive sectors. Amazon's 2.5 billion gallon annual withdrawal, while substantial in absolute terms, represents a small fraction of total data centre water use globally and is dwarfed by other categories of water consumption including agricultural irrigation and municipal use. However, the concentration of data centre water use in specific geographic locations, often coinciding with water-stressed regions where cloud infrastructure is sited for economic and connectivity reasons, makes localised water stewardship and community partnership particularly important even if aggregate sector consumption is relatively modest.

The choice of evaporative cooling over chiller-based alternatives reflects a deliberate trade-off between water and electricity consumption that Amazon has concluded favours moderate water use during peak temperature hours. Chillers that work like giant air conditioners typically require 25 to 35 percent more electricity, and that extra demand often arrives precisely when everyone else needs power for fans and air conditioners, further stressing grids that are already at peak load. Amazon determined it is better overall to use some water during the hottest days of the year than to overconsume electricity during the moments when the grid is most stressed, illustrating the complex multi-resource trade-offs inherent in sustainable data centre design.

 

Explore OneStop ESG Marketplace: Water and Wastewater

 

Outlook for Data Centre Water Stewardship

 

Amazon's water efficiency progress provides a reference benchmark for the rapidly expanding data centre sector as AI infrastructure buildout intensifies demand for compute capacity in locations that may already face water stress. Whether the 7x efficiency advantage over the industry average can be maintained or improved as AI workloads require increasingly dense and powerful chips generating more heat per square metre will depend on continued innovation in cooling system design and server thermal tolerance. Amazon's 75 percent progress toward its water positive 2030 goal, combined with the 5.8 billion gallon annual return capacity from announced projects, demonstrates that ambitious water stewardship targets are achievable alongside operational scaling if pursued with sustained investment and engineering commitment.

The convergence of growing AI infrastructure demand, increasing regulatory and community scrutiny of data centre water consumption in water-stressed regions and growing corporate sustainability reporting requirements creates conditions in which water stewardship is becoming a material licence-to-operate consideration for data centre operators globally. Companies that can demonstrate genuine community benefit from their water programmes, rather than simply minimising consumption, are likely to face fewer regulatory barriers and community objections to data centre expansion in the locations with the best infrastructure, connectivity and clean energy access. Amazon's reclaimed water leadership and community water investment programme provides a model for how hyperscale operators can move from water efficiency to active water stewardship that creates measurable local benefit.

 

Source: Amazon News