Amazon used 2.5B gallons of water for AI — and says it's a leader

amazon released its first water usage report, revealing its data centers consumed 2.5 billion gallons of water in 2025 at an intensity of 0.12 liters per kilowatt-hour, a two percent improvement despite expansion. the tech giant claims a competitive advantage over microsoft, google, and meta by citing lower water usage metrics and asserting its facilities are seven times more efficient than the industry average, largely by using evaporative cooling only on extreme heat days. this transparency arrives as utilities and regulators scrutinize the environmental impact of ai, specifically after seattle enacted a data center moratorium driven by resource concerns. the disclosure signals an escalating industry challenge where physical resource constraints, like water scarcity, increasingly dictate the speed and location of future ai compute capacity.