Amazon is reporting that its data centres are seven times more water-efficient than the industry average – saying it is constantly innovating to reduce the amount of water used, resulting in a 52% improvement in water efficiency since 2021.
Amazon said it is 75% of the way to its goal of being water positive by 2030, meaning that for every gallon of water it uses in data centre operations, it will return more than a gallon back to the communities where it operates. In 2025, it returned 3 gallons for every 4 used— the global online giant announced over 50 water projects that are expected to return more than 5.8 billion gallons annually once fully implemented.
According to Amazon, its data centres 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. It also uses reclaimed water (water that would have otherwise been wasted or unusable) across more data centres than any other company, and is helping communities develop reclaimed water programs from the ground up.
When data centres use water for cooling, one of the key metrics is how efficiently they use the water - meaning how little water they use for each unit of compute. Amazon has announced that its global data centre operations used just 0.12 litres of water per kilowatt-hour (L/kWh) in 2025, a rate that is over 7x more efficient than the industry average of 0.84 L/kWh.
Alongside limiting water usage, the company says it is pioneering the use of reclaimed water which comes from wastewater treatment plants, not drinking water supplies.
"Data centres enable everything from video calls to virtual medical visits and education to online banking," says Joern Tinnemeyer, a data centre 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, the data centres use “free air cooling," pulling in outside air, running it past servers to absorb the heat, then pumping it back outside, with no water involved. "
However, 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 the point at which Amazon uses use evaporative cooling, in which water is sprayed onto an absorbent medium. Hot air flows through the water-soaked material, and as the water evaporates, it pulls heat from the air, cooling it by five to 10 degrees.
According to Amazon, some companies instead use chillers that work like giant air conditioners - and typically require 25% to 35% more electricity, However, the company points out that with currently available technology, using water during hot hours actually reduces overall environmental and community impact, commenting:
“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.”
Running hotter to use less water
For the past few years, Amazon has been steadily raising the temperature thresholds at which its data centres 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 down. After a few years of iteration, learning, and adjusting, Amazon 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 water use in half without any impact on performance."
To validate the approach, Amazon analyzed thousands of hours of data across data centre campuses, checking failure rates at higher temperatures.
Amazon water specialist Beau Schilz said the failure rate didn't increase and the results have been significant: "Our engineers looked at two identical data centres on the same campus and were able to use about 50% less water in one of them that was running with higher temperatures."
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