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Leaked document reveals Amazon deliberately planned to hide data centers’ full water use.

Amazon deliberately excludes majority of water use from public sustainability reports
Serdar Dincel, Türkiye Today, Sat, 25 Oct 2025

mazon deliberately withheld information about the complete scope of its data centers’ water consumption from the public to protect its corporate image, according to an internal document obtained by the Guardian.

The leaked memo reveals that executives at Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing arm, debated whether to report what they termed “secondary” water use — the water consumed in generating electricity for the company’s data centers — before launching a 2022 sustainability campaign.

Ultimately, leadership opted to publicize only a fraction of the company’s water footprint, citing concerns about “reputational risk” if total consumption figures became public knowledge.

The document, dated one month before AWS unveiled its “Water Positive” initiative in November 2022, shows Amazon consumed 105 billion gallons of water in 2021. That volume would supply approximately 958,000 U.S. households annually, comparable to a city larger than San Francisco.

Company reported fraction of actual consumption in public campaign

Instead of reporting this total, Amazon disclosed only its primary water use — 7.7 billion gallons per year, roughly equivalent to 11,600 Olympic-sized swimming pools — when measuring progress toward sustainability goals.

The Water Positive campaign committed Amazon to “return more water than it uses” by 2030, targeting a reduction in primary use to 4.9 billion gallons. Secondary water consumption was excluded from these calculations…………………………………………….

As the world’s largest data center operator, Amazon is rapidly expanding its artificial intelligence infrastructure despite growing concerns about water resources needed to cool computing facilities. The company has faced mounting criticism for refusing to disclose total water usage, a transparency measure adopted by competitors Microsoft and Google.

Amazon’s Water Positive campaign remains active but continues to exclude secondary water use from its accounting, and the company has not made its overall water consumption public. https://www.turkiyetoday.com/business/amazon-deliberately-excludes-majority-of-water-use-from-public-sustainability-reports-3208989

October 27, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | water