Amazon's data centers are 7x more water-efficient than the industry average. Here’s how we do it.

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 buildings 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.

Sources: Microsoft 2025 Sustainability Report, Microsoft AI blog, Microsoft Datacenters blog, Google Cloud blog, “ Measuring the environmental impact of delivering AI at Google Scale ”, Meta 2025 Environmental Data Index, Amazon Sustainability Report 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.

How Amazon cools its data centers "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 5 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. Next-gen AI demands smarter cooling tech. Here's how AWS delivered it in just 11 months. Denser, more powerful chips called for designing a completely custom liquid cooling system.

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