Amazon Web Services just put a number on what environmentalists have been warning about for years. The company’s global data centers withdrew approximately 2.5 billion gallons of water in 2025, a figure that makes the resource demands of the AI revolution impossible to ignore.
To put that in perspective, 2.5 billion gallons is roughly enough to fill about 3,800 Olympic swimming pools. Every year. Just to keep servers cool.
The numbers tell two stories at once
AWS reported a 2% year-over-year decline in water withdrawals compared to 2024. That’s notable because the company has been aggressively expanding its data center footprint to meet surging AI demand.
The company’s water usage effectiveness, or WUE, came in at 0.12 liters per kilowatt-hour. For every unit of energy its data centers consume, Amazon uses a fraction of the water that its peers do. The industry average sits at 0.84 liters per kilowatt-hour, which means AWS is operating at roughly seven times better efficiency than the typical data center.
