If you hang out in any even vaguely AI-skeptical parts of the Internet, you’ve probably stumbled on plenty of memes and posts premised on data centers’ insatiable thirst for water to power evaporative cooling. But a new report from Amazon highlights just how little water all these AI data centers are using in aggregate, on a relative basis, even as individual data centers can strain local water supplies.
In a Thursday blog post, Amazon claims its data centers withdrew “about 2.5 billion gallons” globally in 2025. That number sounds incredibly large at first glance, but it looks downright puny compared to the 117 trillion gallons of water withdrawn in the US alone in 2015. It’s also useful to compare Amazon’s number to stats from more water-intensive areas, from the 3.3 trillion gallons used annually on US lawns and landscaping to the 1.3 trillion gallons a year used in California almond orchards to the 531 billion gallons a year used just for US golf courses.
Amazon is just one company, of course, and a relative latecomer to reporting its data center water usage numbers. Google data centers withdrew about more than 6.1 billion gallons of water in 2024, on top of about 2.75 billion gallons from Microsoft and about 1.4 billion gallons from Meta in the same year.
All told, a 2021 Nature study estimates that all US data centers combined consumed about 163 billion gallons of water that year, a number that includes “indirect” consumption from non-renewable power sources. That number has doubtlessly increased in the AI-driven years since that study was published—one analysis estimates that Texas data centers alone used 25 to 49 billion gallons in 2024, and could grow to withdraw 399 billion gallons in 2030. But even annual data center water usage measured in the trillions would represent a figurative (and kind of literal) drop in the bucket compared to national and worldwide water usage statistics.
You must log in or register to comment.
- crunchy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish17 days
The people trying to profit from AI really want us to focus on the water usage because they have these rebuttals ready to go.
Notice they don’t have one for the power consumption, pollution, noise, or any other drain local resources.
17 daysI am also curious if this water figure includes water for generators that are often used to power the things, or just “the data center part.”
- 17 days
I’m concerned about the pollution and noise issue. They seem to disrupt the local ecosystem as well as people living around them terribly.
- turdburglar@piefed.socialEnglish17 days
elon musk’s xai in memphis (grok) is using 1.5 million gallons of water per day for cooling.
he is pulling the water from the drinking water aquifer, using it to cool his tiny dick computer and then dumping the waste water in the mississippi.
he is not wasting regular ground water, it is 1500 year old memphis sands aquifer water that tastes amazing.
he promised to build a water treatment plant to use greywater instead, but halted that construction project because reasons.
fuck elon. fuck xai.
please do not use grok.
- TowardsTheFuture@lemmy.zipEnglish17 days
“If you just compare one single business in an industry to entire industries that people have complained about wasting water, this one is nothing!”
- 17 days
even as individual data centers can strain local water supplies
Isn’t this the main problem. Doesn’t matter what they use in aggregate if most places dont have a data center what matters is the area around the data centers
I tend to trust Ars. Consider the source. Though I fully expected a response like this.
- 17 days
Ars Technica, owned by Conde Nast and The Wired Group, both of which are owned by Advance Publications, is a zionist pro-billionaire propaganda outlet.
Fun fact, the owner of Advance Publications, officially listed as “the Newhouse Family,” also has a majority share in reddit and sits on its board of directors. In case you might be wondering where you got your bias towards it.
- 16 days
The source is literally Amazon, it’s like the second sentence of the post.
Amazon provides their own numbers, and the rest is reported. The hed is not Amazon’s. It’s called sourcing.
Look, I’m not a fan of “AI,” but I do care about the quality of reporting, and Kyle is solid. I know it’s en vogue to immediately bash anything that’s not flaming vitriol, but learn some media literacy instead of just having a knee-jerk reaction because Amazon is a source. That’s going to happen when covering Amazon. Where else do you expect to get those data?
Let’s say this is total horseshit, which it may well be. Do the other figures provided still tell the same story assuming Amazon is understating water use by an order of magnitude? Yep. If all you care about is water use, railing against golf courses and calling for an end to lawn watering is going to be more effective.
If all you care about is AMAZON BAD, then your response makes sense.
- 15 days
If all you care about is AMAZON BAD, then your response makes sense.
No, my response makes sense because it’s literally, “we’ve investigated ourselves and have found no wrongdoing”.
You are taking PR from the largest corporation on the planet about the environmental impact of their own data centers. Surely you’re not that stupid.
Environmentalists have been decrying the levels of water use at golf courses and on traditional lawns for literally decades. If you take the self-reported figures from the behemoth tech companies and compare it to the worst industrial wastes of clean drinking water or to entire nations worth of water usage, the tech companies seem small. That doesnt make their impact any less significant, but it does make this a greenwashing rag.
Media literacy isnt about having a curated list of trusted sources that you take as gospel, it’s about critically reading, understanding, and questioning the content before determining meaning and impact.
