Amazon Web Services is facing a lawsuit alleging it published false and misleading statements about the water use and sustainability of its Northern Virginia datacenters, "falsely" portraying those operations as environmentally responsible. The complaint, case number CL26002535-00 filed with the Circuit Court of Arlington County last week, seen by The Register, states that AWS has never publicly disclosed its actual water consumption in the region, known as the world's "datacenter capital."Despite this, the filing says, AWS has repeatedly published assertions regarding its water use and sustainability credentials that the suit alleges to be false, misleading, or unsubstantiated. By doing so, it has hidden the true scale of its water consumption, preventing policymakers and the public from independently assessing the accuracy of its claims, the complaint adds.
The named plaintiff in this case is Dr Nathan Wangusi, a water resources scientist who served as the water sustainability program manager at AWS for almost three years until September 2024.
The lawsuit says Dr Wangusi obtained detailed billing and water consumption records for AWS facilities in Northern Virginia using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests sent to water utilities in the region covering 2023 through 2026.The US's Freedom of Information Act gives any person – a private citizen, a foreign national, or a corporation – the statutory right to request access to federal agency records.The lawsuit claims that these FOIA records "materially differ" from the publicly reported water use figures disclosed by AWS.In particular, the complaint pours cold water – pun intended – on some assertions AWS made in a blog post last month, and covered by The Register at the time. For example, AWS said that in Northern Virginia, it had "dropped water use by 42 percent year-over-year, even as demand for computing continued to grow."AWS, however, did not disclose the comparison period, reporting boundary, or methodology underlying that figure, making independent verification impossible, Dr Wangusi claims in the lawsuit.The complaint goes on to allege:
