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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 | Leave a comment

Data centers consume massive amounts of water – companies rarely tell the public exactly how much.

August 19, 2025 , Peyton McCauley and Melissa Scanlan

As demand for artificial intelligence technology boosts construction and proposed construction of data centers around the world, those computers require not just electricity and land, but also a significant amount of water. Data centers use water directly, with cooling water pumped through pipes in and around the computer equipment. They also use water indirectly, through the water required to produce the electricity to power the facility. The amount of water used to produce electricity increases dramatically when the source is fossil fuels compared with solar or wind………………………….

The Great Lakes are an important, binational resource that more than 40 million people depend on for their drinking water and supports a US$6 trillion regional economy. Data centers compete with these existing uses and may deplete local groundwater aquifers.

Our analysis of public records, government documents and sustainability reports compiled by top data center companies has found that technology companies don’t always reveal how much water their data centers use. In a forthcoming Rutgers Computer and Technology Law Journal article, we walk through our methods and findings using these resources to uncover the water demands of data centers.

In general, corporate sustainability reports offered the most access and detail – including that in 2024, one data center in Iowa consumed 1 billion (3.8 billion liters) gallons of water – enough to supply all of Iowa’s residential water for five days.

How do data centers use water?

The servers and routers in data centers work hard and generate a lot of heat. To cool them down, data centers use large amounts of water – in some cases over 25% of local community water supplies. In 2023, Google reported consuming over 6 billion gallons of water (nearly 23 billion liters) to cool all its data centers.

In some data centers, the water is used up in the cooling process. In an evaporative cooling system, pumps push cold water through pipes in the data center. The cold water absorbs the heat produced by the data center servers, turning into steam that is vented out of the facility. This system requires a constant supply of cold water………………………………………………………………………….

Sustainability reports offer a valuable glimpse into data center water use. But because the reports are voluntary, different companies report different statistics in ways that make them hard to combine or compare. Importantly, these disclosures do not consistently include the indirect water consumption from their electricity use, which the Lawrence Berkeley Lab estimated was 12 times greater than the direct use for cooling in 2023. Our estimates highlighting specific water consumption reports are all related to cooling.

Amazon releases annual sustainability reports, but those documents do not disclose how much water the company uses. Microsoft provides data on its water demands for its overall operations, but does not break down water use for its data centers. Meta does that breakdown, but only in a companywide aggregate figure. Google provides individual figures for each data center.

In general, the five companies we analyzed that do disclose water usage show a general trend of increasing direct water use each year. Researchers attribute this trend to data centers.

A closer look at Google and Meta

To take a deeper look, we focused on Google and Meta, as they provide some of the most detailed reports of data center water use.

Data centers make up significant proportions of both companies’ water use. In 2023, Meta consumed 813 million gallons of water globally (3.1 billion liters) – 95% of which, 776 million gallons (2.9 billion liters), was used by data centers…………………………………………………………………………………

Given society’s growing interest in AI, the data center industry will likely continue its rapid expansion. But without a consistent and transparent way to track water consumption over time, the public and government officials will be making decisions about locations, regulations and sustainability without complete information on how these massive companies’ hot and thirsty buildings will affect their communities and their environments.

https://theconversation.com/data-centers-consume-massive-amounts-of-water-companies-rarely-tell-the-public-exactly-how-much-262901

August 21, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | water | Leave a comment

Nuclear Energy Expansion Faces Water Resource Challenges

Oil Price, By Haley Zaremba – Apr 10, 2025.

• The global nuclear energy sector is experiencing a renaissance with increased interest and expansion plans, but faces the challenge of high water consumption for reactor cooling.
• Debates surround the actual water needs of nuclear power, with some arguing it uses more water than coal and renewables, while others claim water use can be managed with existing licenses and recycling.
• Advancements in nuclear technology, including small modular reactors and future designs using gas or air cooling, offer potential solutions to reduce water dependency, but concerns about increased nuclear waste persist.

A global nuclear energy renaissance is unfolding. Around the world, the public and private sectors are warming to the idea of nuclear energy expansion to meet ballooning energy demand driven by data centers without throwing decarbonization accords out the window. ………….

However, next-generation nuclear does have some key drawbacks as well. For one, studies have shown that SMRs will create more nuclear waste than traditional models. This presents a tricky and expensive problem, as the highly radioactive waste material remains hazardous for thousands of years in the best of scenarios. For another, nuclear energy is an extremely thirsty form of power production, requiring huge quantities of water to cool down the reactors for optimal particle speed for fission, as well as to generate steam to create electricity.

According to Dave Sweeney, a nuclear policy analyst at the Australian Conservation Foundation, nuclear power uses more water than coal, and “massively more than renewables” on a per-kilowatt basis. Sweeney was speaking with the Guardian in reference to a recent conflict between political parties in Australia over planned nuclear expansion and water scarcity. A report commissioned by the organization Liberals Against Nuclear found that a whopping 90% of the nuclear generation capacity proposed by the opposing Coalition party lacks sufficient access to water for safe operations. “Half of the proposed nuclear capacity was already unfeasible given insufficient water, while a further 40% of the capacity would need to be curtailed during dry seasons,” the Guardian reported this week based on the findings. ……………………….
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Nuclear-Energy-Expansion-Faces-Water-Resource-Challenges.html

April 13, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | water | Leave a comment

Southern boom town that is just 24 miles away from dangerous canyon contaminated by plutonium

By Alex Hammer For Dailymail.Com, 16 September 2024, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13765533/canyon-contaminated-plutonium-santa-fe-boom-town.html

Residents of Santa Fe, New Mexico – less than a half-hour drive from the birthplace of the atomic bomb – are drinking from a water supply with alarming traces of plutonium, scientists have found.

The shocking samples were taken from Los Alamos’s soil just 24 miles from Santa Fe, which has roughly 90,000 residents.

Experts warned have since warned that the discovery could mean a rehabilitation project is necessary to save the city’s drinking water.

The contaminated soil can be found right on the cusp of Los Alamos, in the area’s appropriately named Acid Canyon, where radioactive waste seeped into the land from 1943 to 1964.

‘We need to permanently protect precious, irreplaceable groundwater and the Rio Grande while providing high-paying cleanup jobs for decades,’ said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch, in an email to Santa Fe New Mexican this past spring.

Pointing to maps showing the contaminated spots across an area of land, Coghlan asserted that there was proof a ‘genuine cleanup’ is needed. 

While the water in Santa Fe is still drinkable with its current levels of plutonium, Coghlan said the radioactive drinking water ‘should be of great concern to Northern New Mexicans’. 

In Santa Fe County, up to 3 picocuries per liter of plutonium were recorded in the water supply – twice the guideline set by the New Mexico Administrative Code, according to the outlet.

Nuclear Watch also compiled data plutonium contamination below the soil from 1992 and 2023 through plot points on a map.

Huge hot spots were found at dump sites of an old lab used for experiments. 

This, of course, was at Los Alamos’ National Laboratory, located a little more than a mile out of town, and one of 16 research and development sites used and owned by the United States Department of Energy. 

Contamination in surface water like streams and rivers has been traced back to places including the hiking trail Acid Canyon, where the lab discarded waste from 1943 to 1964.

Its past pollution could now be migrating down to the area’s unseen aquifer underground – likely bringing the pollutants across San Ildefonso Pueblo land and into the Rio Grande, Coghlan warned.

The river feeds into the Buckman Direct Diversion Project, a system of integrated infrastructure used to divert as much as 2.8 billion gallons of surface water to Santa Fe annually.

That water serves as nearly half of Santa Fe’s public drinking supply – a cause for concern, according to Coghlan.

Over the past 40 years, Santa Fe has seen its population almost double to roughly 90,000, leading it to earn the distinction of ‘boom town’ in a 2019 national survey.

In the years since, the city added roughly 5,000 residents, for an increase of about 6 percent as occupied homes and per capita income have also grown.

The news of Acid Canyon’s contamination comes almost 20 years after the Department of Energy and the University of California – the lab’s previous operator – made an agreement with the New Mexico Environment Department to clean up the contamination.

Spread out over decades, the efforts have so far been unsuccessful in remediating the fallout, data from Nuclear Watch shows – as the NMED seeks a full cleanup at one of the dump sites at a cost of over $800 million to protect Santa Fe’s drinking water.

As it stands, radiation levels are not high enough to hurt those walking the Acid Canyon trail, but Coghlan pointed out another danger that would happen if a fire broke out.

‘Were Acid Canyon to burn in a wildfire, and we know that threat is all too real, that could be dangerous in the form of respirable plutonium that is released to the air through wildfire,’ he said.

Warning the smoke inhaled could lead to lung cancer, Coghlan had his concerns echoed by the Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Northern Arizona University, Dr. Michael Ketterer.

‘I’m just trying to show New Mexicans what the truth is here,’ he said after collecting and analyzing plutonium samples from trailheads at Acid Canyon. ‘I see a lot of things to be concerned about here.’ 

We can’t really predict where it’s going to go and how bad it’s going to be,’ he continued, of the possibility of a fire creating deadly conditions in the area.

Surrounding communities could be at risk as well, including historic Santa Fe, as the shocking contamination data saw Ketterer question whether official warnings should be posted across the trail.

‘I’ve never seen anything quite like it in the United States,’ Ketterer. ‘This is an unrestricted area.’ 

He went on to compare radiation levels seen at the popular park to those at the site of the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

‘It’s just an extreme example of very high concentrations of plutonium in soils and sediments,’ the biochemist said. ‘It’s hiding in plain sight.’

The biochemist also noted that high concentrations of plutonium in the canyon’s water posed wider environmental risks to communities and habitats downstream. 

‘Under monsoon storm flow conditions, Pu [plutonium] laden water and sediment flow through Acid Canyon and into Los Alamos Canyon and ultimately, the Rio Grande,’ he noted in a presentation for Nuclear Watch New Mexico.

Radioactive plutonium in ground water, Ketterer noted, can also be absorbed by plants where it enter the food chain via local veggie-eating herbivores, or spread as airborne ash following increasingly common wildfires. 

‘This is one of the most shocking things I’ve ever stumbled across in my life,’ the biochemist recently told The Guardian of the unsettling find.

Meanwhile, the cleanup of the lab’s Cold War sites is only half complete, the DOE reports. 

Should the department’s plans be finalized, all pits and shafts would be excavated and radioactive waste interred at Carlsbad’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. 

September 17, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | water | Leave a comment