Amazon says its data centers consumed about 2.5 billion gallons of water globally in 2025 — less than US golf courses use in a year.
The figure comes from a blog post Amazon published, framed as evidence that the AI-driven data center boom isn't the water crisis its critics claim. The comparison set is strategically flattering: 117 trillion gallons withdrawn across the US in 2015, 3.3 trillion for lawns and landscaping, 1.3 trillion for California's almond industry, 531 billion just for golf. Amazon's 2.5 billion looks trivial against those numbers. Add the other major cloud players — Google at more than 6.1 billion gallons in 2024, Microsoft at about 2.75 billion, Meta at about 1.4 billion — and the entire sector is still a rounding error against American agriculture.
The problem is that water stress isn't a national accounting exercise. A data center drawing heavily from a single desert aquifer doesn't care that lawns in Ohio dilute its footprint in the spreadsheet. The communities most affected by data center siting tend to be in drought-prone regions where industrial withdrawals land very differently than they do in an aggregate.
Amazon is also a relative latecomer to reporting water usage publicly at all, which makes the timing of its sudden transparency worth noting. Publishing favorable numbers is easier when the numbers are, in fact, favorable.