As they face increasing backlash over their resource consumption, major data center operators are scrambling to prove they’re not a drain on the environment, or, at least, not as much of one as their competition.
Amazon has published some bold new claims to this end: The tech giant says it has achieved a 52% improvement in water efficiency over the last 5 years, and says its data centers are 7x more water-efficient than the industry average.
This, the company says, is thanks to a mix of innovative methods, including free air and evaporative cooling, and increased temperature thresholds.
The announcement underscores the importance of disclosure in the AI era, and signals that technology is no longer the sole differentiator, said , which used 0.27 L/kWh in 2025, dropping from .30 in 2024. has hovered around .20 L/kWh.
Amazon employs a multiple methods to garner these results, it says.
Firstly, roughly 90% of the time the company uses “free air cooling,” pulling outside air into data centers, letting the air absorb heat, then pumping it back outside, with , VP and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.
The 0.12 figure is Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), which measures the water used at the data center per kilowatt-hour of IT load. The metric was introduced by ), the standard metric for measuring data center efficiency, sits around 1.15.
“This means they’re not achieving this strong water number at the expense of a weak energy number,” Kimball said.
Not a secret recipe
While the gains are impressive, the techniques Amazon highlights are increasingly becoming standard practices, Kimball pointed out.
“Amazon is on the leading edge, but it’s not a secret recipe,” he said. What sets the company apart is scale, execution, facility design, geographic mix, and its aggressive pursuit of energy goals.
Others are doing the similar things, if through different avenues: Microsoft is investing in closed-loop cooling systems that dramatically reduce evaporative water loss. Google is heavily focused on reclaimed water and using AI to optimize data centers. Meta has long relied on outside-air cooling. And overall, the industry is moving toward liquid cooling for dense AI deployments, “which changes the water equation again,” said Kimball.
One of the big variables is location: Climate influences water efficiency, so where a company builds its infrastructure is as important as its cooling methods. Further, power-consumptive AI changes the discussion, he emphasized; traditional enterprise workloads and dense AI training clusters create very different thermal profiles.
“The industry is still working through what the long-term water and energy balance looks like as AI infrastructure scales,” Kimball said.
The disclosure arms race
As Gogia noted, what separates operators now is disclosure.
For instance, Microsoft has committed to publishing water data for every US data center region, while Equinix reports a portfolio figure of 0.91 L/kWh and 1.41 L/kWh for its evaporative-cooled sites, which is a “boundary discipline most of the market has yet to adopt,” said Gogia.
The next phase of cloud competition will be won on transparency, not just thermodynamics, he contended. “Operators that disclose region by region will expand faster, permit easier and litigate less.” In fact, his firm expects water disclosure to become a standard line item in cloud and AI infrastructure RFPs within 12 to 24 months.
CIOs should demand region-level withdrawal and consumption data, source-water mix, cooling architecture by region, drought contingency plans, and a “clean separation between operational efficiency and replenishment accounting,” Gogia advised.
Meanwhile, the timing of this reporting tells its own story: Amazon published these figures two days after its home city Seattle put a one-year freeze on new large data centers, citing water use as a big concern. Further, more than 70 US jurisdictions now have temporary or permanent restrictions, and the European Commission is preparing .
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