You guys — 2.5 BILLION GALLONS of water in one year for data centers alone! Amazon just released its annual usage numbers after a Seattle moratorium (pushed by their own employees) made them do it, and the scale is honestly hard to wrap your head around. They claim they're now at 0.12 liters per kilowatt-hour — down 2% from last year despite expanding operations — and are calling themselves seven times more water-efficient than the industry average based on a peer-reviewed study. But here’s what makes me lean in: Amazon is also showing this against Google, whose Gemini AI data centers use significantly MORE water per kWh over comparable periods. That's an efficiency claim they will ride hard — and it shows why these numbers matter in new debates about the real cost of training LLMs at scale!
What’s even more interesting are the operational choices behind those figures, because Amazon isn't just "being efficient" by magic. They use air cooling roughly 90% of the time and only resort to evaporative water cooling on the hottest hours of the hottest days while simultaneously raising their servers' operating temperature tolerances to reduce need for cooling. There is a subtle but critical caveat worth calling out, though: Amazon’s figures don't account for indirect water use at power plants that supply electricity — which is another massive bucket of water usage in its own right — nor do they include construction-related consumption. So it’s an improvement on the previous reporting framework, not necessarily a complete picture, but still worth watching as data center design evolves to address these concerns more transparently over time.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/tech/948534/amazon-data-centers-water-use
What’s even more interesting are the operational choices behind those figures, because Amazon isn't just "being efficient" by magic. They use air cooling roughly 90% of the time and only resort to evaporative water cooling on the hottest hours of the hottest days while simultaneously raising their servers' operating temperature tolerances to reduce need for cooling. There is a subtle but critical caveat worth calling out, though: Amazon’s figures don't account for indirect water use at power plants that supply electricity — which is another massive bucket of water usage in its own right — nor do they include construction-related consumption. So it’s an improvement on the previous reporting framework, not necessarily a complete picture, but still worth watching as data center design evolves to address these concerns more transparently over time.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/tech/948534/amazon-data-centers-water-use