A new report from Amazon highlights the relatively small scale of water use by AI data centers, even as individual facilities can strain local supplies. In a Thursday blog post, Amazon claims its data centers withdrew 'about 2.5 billion gallons' globally in 2025. That number, while large, pales in comparison to the 117 trillion gallons of water withdrawn in the US alone in 2015. It's also useful to compare Amazon’s figure to stats from more water-intensive areas, such as the 3.3 trillion gallons used annually on US lawns and landscaping. Amazon is just one company, and a relative latecomer to reporting its data center water usage numbers. Google data centers withdrew about 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.

While there’s no risk of big tech companies literally draining the oceans to power the data centers behind their LLMs, even moderately sized data centers can have an outsized effect on nearby water resources. A single Meta data center in Newton County, Georgia, now uses about 10 percent of the entire county’s water supply, according to a New York Times report from last year. And the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin recently estimated that data centers account for 8 percent of total water consumption in the region, a rate that could climb to 29 percent by 2050 if the large concentration of data centers in northern Virginia continues apace. That kind of concentrated water use can put severe strain on local infrastructure and water supplies, and has led to at least one situation where a data center siphoned millions of gallons from local sources without initially paying.

Source: arstechnica