The AI boom has a thirst problem. After spending much of the past year defending the staggering electricity demands of their data centers, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are now facing a second front: water.
The numbers tell the story
Amazon reported that its data centers withdrew approximately 2.5 billion gallons of water in 2025. That’s actually a 2% decrease from the previous year, and the company pointed to an efficiency metric of 0.12 liters of water per kilowatt-hour as evidence of progress.
Google’s numbers paint a different picture. The search giant consumed 7.2 billion gallons of freshwater in 2024, though it claims to have replenished about 4.5 billion gallons. That works out to a 64% replenishment rate, which sounds impressive until you realize the remaining 2.7 billion gallons simply vanished into the cooling apparatus of the AI machine.
Zoom out further and the aggregate figures get genuinely startling. Data centers across North America consumed nearly 1 trillion liters of water in 2025. For context, that’s roughly equivalent to New York City’s entire annual water consumption.
