Key takeaways

• Amazon's data centers are over 7x more water-efficient than the industry average, using air cooling for most of the year and water only during the hottest days.
• We’re 75% of the way to our goal of being water positive by 2030, meaning that for every gallon of water we use in our data center operations, we will return more than a gallon back to the communities where we operate. In 2025, we returned 3 gallons for every 4 we used—and we’ve announced over 50 water projects that are expected to return more than 5.8 billion gallons annually once fully implemented.
• We use reclaimed water (water that would have otherwise been wasted or unusable) across more data centers than any other company, and we’re helping communities develop reclaimed water programs from the ground up.

When data centers use water for cooling, one of the most important metrics is how efficiently they use that water—meaning how little water they use for each unit of compute. Amazon announced that its global data center operations used just 0.12 liters of water per kilowatt-hour (L/kWh) in 2025, a rate that’s over 7x more efficient than the industry average of 0.84 L/kWh.

In other words, we use far less water per unit of compute than others in the global data center industry, which as a whole accounts for less than 0.5% of all industrial water use globally.

And we’re continuing to get even more efficient year over year. These efficiency gains are the result of years of investment in custom cooling technology, smarter systems, and a commitment to minimize water use wherever possible.

Along with limiting water usage, we’re pioneering the use of reclaimed water, which comes from wastewater treatment plants, not drinking water supplies.

"Data centers enable everything from video calls to virtual medical visits and education to online banking," says Joern Tinnemeyer, a data center engineering leader at Amazon. "To deliver that computing reliably, we need to maintain optimal temperatures. My team focuses on thermal management—taking the heat generated as a byproduct of computing operations and removing it as effectively and as efficiently as possible."

About 90% of the time, our data centers use “free air cooling," pulling in outside air, running it past servers to absorb the heat, then pumping it back outside—no water involved. "It's kind of like in your house," Tinnemeyer says. "It's a nice summer morning. It's not that hot out. I'm gonna open up my windows rather than turn the air conditioner on, and just let the breeze pull through."

But when the hottest hours of the hottest days arrive, especially in warmer parts of the world, the air gets too hot and humid to cool the servers effectively. This is when we use evaporative cooling, in which water is sprayed onto an absorbent medium that Amazon water specialist Beau Schilz describes as "a sophisticated, giant sponge." Hot air flows through this water-soaked material, and as the water evaporates, it pulls heat from the air, cooling it by five to 10 degrees.

"It's like sweating," Schilz explains. "The evaporative process pulls the heat off of your body so you don't overheat."

Some companies instead use chillers that work like giant air conditioners. But with currently available technology, using water during hot hours actually reduces overall environmental and community impact. That’s because chillers typically require 25% to 35% more electricity, and that extra demand often comes precisely when everyone else needs power for their fans and air conditioners. We determined it's better overall to use some water during the hottest days of the year than to overconsume electricity during the very moments when the grid is most stressed.

Running hotter to use less water

For the past few years, we’ve been steadily raising the temperature thresholds at which our data centers operate, designing servers to tolerate more heat. If servers can tolerate more heat, they can reduce the number of hours they need water to cool things down. After a few years of iteration, learning, and adjusting, we now use water to cool incoming air only when ambient temperatures exceed roughly 85° F, making the system efficient in most climates.

"This is how we innovate at Amazon," Tinnemeyer says. "We set an ambitious target that benefits our customers, iterate relentlessly, and validate with data—in this case, proving we could cut water use in half without any impact on performance."

To validate the approach, we analyzed thousands of hours of data across data center campuses, checking failure rates at higher temperatures. "The failure rate didn't increase," Schilz says.

The results have been significant: "Our engineers looked at two identical data centers on the same campus and were able to use about 50% less water in one of them that was running with higher temperatures," Schilz says.

For example, in Northern Virginia, our largest region by IT load, we dropped water use by 42% year-over-year, even as demand for computing continued to grow.

75% of the way to water positive

While we’re constantly getting more efficient and we’re using less water per kWh of server use every year, we want to go well beyond that and actually create more usable water around the world than we consume. So we've committed to being water positive by 2030 and we’re already about 75% of the way there.

How do we do that? First, we track how much water we use so we understand how much water we’ll need to return to reach our goal. In 2025, we withdrew about 2.5 billion gallons across our entire global data center footprint during the whole year. To put that in perspective, Americans use roughly 3.3 trillion gallons a year to water their lawns and gardens, according to the EPA—meaning every year landscape irrigation uses over 1,300 times more water than our data centers. And, at the sites we own and operate directly, the total amount of water we withdrew decreased 2% from 2024 to 2025, even as the number of buildings we have around the world continued to grow.

Next, we invest in and invent ways to capture water that would be otherwise wasted and "return" it to communities that need it.

Data centers overall use less than 0.5% of all global industrial water use, and Amazon is a small fraction of that.

For example, in Hermiston, Oregon, we’re funding a project to pull water from the Columbia River during peak winter flows, storing it in an aquifer for use during drier parts of the year. In northeastern Spain we worked with environmental consultancy Mediodes on a pipeline that moves runoff water from upstream fields to a poplar grove in the town of Pina del Ebro, reducing the need to pull irrigation water from the Ebro River. Near Guadalajara, Mexico, we’re supporting a watershed restoration project to help the ground absorb more rainwater and stop pollution from flowing into the Santiago River basin.

Together, we’ve announced over 50  water projects expected to return more than 5.8  billion gallons of water annually for use by local communities. That's enough to fill 8,800 Olympic swimming pools.

We’re also working to benefit the communities where we operate by using water in our own operations that would otherwise be unusable. We’re pioneering the use of this "reclaimed" water, sourcing from wastewater treatment plants instead of using drinkable water. We already operate 26 facilities using 100% reclaimed water, more than any other cloud provider, with 130 more contracted globally. In Mississippi, Hong Kong, and Indonesia, we’ve created reclaimed water programs by funding infrastructure and assisting with permitting.

"We're not just using reclaimed water," says Usman Khan, a water specialist at Amazon for over seven years. "We're helping communities develop these programs from the ground up."

For water specialist Beau Schilz, who spent years in water utilities before joining Amazon, it comes back to being a responsible neighbor. "We're particularly focused on areas where there's water scarcity," he says. "Amazon wants to partner with communities to ensure our water stewardship creates local benefits that they want to see."

As demand for cloud computing continues to grow, so does our commitment to doing more with less—and to leave communities better than we found them.