Amazon wants to help the Colorado River, but we still don’t know how much water the company uses

Amazon wants to help the Colorado River, but we still don’t know how much water the company uses

The Colorado River faces an ‘unprecedented’ drought as data centers demand more water.

The Colorado River faces an ‘unprecedented’ drought as data centers demand more water.

by

Justine Calma

Sep 21, 2026, 11:15 PM UTC

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Justine Calma

is a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of

, a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals.

Amazon plans to spend $20 million on water conservation projects along the Colorado River, a crucial but dwindling water supply for 40 million people in the Western US.

The initiative comes as Amazon and other tech companies face mounting scrutiny over how much water their data centers use. Amazon has a goal of becoming water positive — replenishing more water than it uses — by the end of the decade. It recently disclosed some information about its water use, but we still have an incomplete picture of the company’s impact as a whole.

Amazonannouncedthe launch of a Colorado River Basin Collaborative today, with a mission to “create one of the biggest corporate water conservation efforts for a single U.S. watershed.” It expects to raise $100 million over two years — including the $20 million investment from its own coffers — for water conservation efforts.

The Colorado River brings water to 40 million people

Stretching 1,400 miles, the Colorado River brings water to 40 million people across seven states in the Western US and and two states in Mexico. The waterway has faced “unprecedented” drought over the last 26 years, according to the US Bureau of Reclamation. Decades of overuse on top of human-caused climate change have exacerbated the problem. To cope, the US Department of the Interiorfinalizedaplanin August imposing steep water cuts on Arizona, Nevada, and California.

As the first stop for most goods the US imports from Asia, California is home to more Amazon warehouses than any other state. In Orange County, California, Amazon pledged $2.2 million over the next three years to help detect and patch up leaks. That effort is ultimately supposed to conserve 189 million gallons of water each year, according to Amazon.

As part of the newly announced collaborative, other companies can contract independently with conservation projects they choose. The United Nations-backedWater Resilience Coalitionwill vet projects. Amazon is also joining the Water Resilience Coalition, which includes Microsoft, Meta, and other brands across a range of sectors.

Tech companies are facing waves of resistance against new AI data centers. AI was estimated to use between 312.5 billion and 764.6 billion liters of water in 2025, according to oneestimate, about as much water as people consume globally in water bottles. In Arizona, Colorado River water cuts are expectedto raise utility rates, and some residents fear data centers could make things worse.

In June,Amazondisclosedthat its data centers used 2.5 billion gallons of water globally in 2025, including those it owns, leases, or shares. Data centers Amazon owns and operates directly reduced their water consumption by 2 percent in 2025 compared to the year prior, according to the company. It attributes gains to a 52 percent improvement in water efficiency since 2021. The company says it uses 0.12 liters of water per kilowatt-hour of electricity, claiming that’s about seven times more efficient than the industry average for data centers.

Amazon’s annual sustainabilityreportshares water use per unit of power (l/kwh) for its data centers since 2021, but not the company’s total water use over that time period. Sustainability experts and environmental advocates caution against assessing a company’s sustainability by efficiency measurements alone. The more efficient a technology becomes, the more resources it might ultimately consume as companies start using it more, according to an economic concept calledJevons paradox. That makes it important to track how much water a company is using overall, as well as how much it needs in each place it operates duringdemand peakswhen supply is most limited.

For comparison, Microsoft’s latest sustainabilityreportdiscloses its data centers’ total water use since 2020, while Google’s report shares water use for global operations since 2021 with a breakdown by location. All three tech giants have had to abandon data center projects after facing community opposition,Reutersreports. Unlike other tech companies, Amazon’s warehouses also have a massive physical footprint that isn’t reflected in the company’s data center disclosures.

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AGuardianinvestigationin 2025 alleges that Amazon obscured how much water the company uses by deciding not to account for how much it takes to generate electricity, considered a “secondary” water use. Concerned about “reputational risk,” executives decided to only address “primary” water use at its facilities when calculating progress toward sustainability goals. The numbers Amazon recently shared about its data center water use alsoexclude water consumption stemming from electricity generation.

While data centers often use water for cooling systems, a majority of a data center’s water footprint stems from this “secondary use.” Power plants need water to cool equipment and turn turbines using steam, and in 2021, Amazon used 10.5 billion gallons (39.7 billion liters) of water in 2021, according to theGuardianreport citing an internal leaked document. That’s about as much as 95,000 US households consume.

In an email toThe Verge, Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan says theGuardianreport “relied on cherry-picked data from an outdated document that misrepresents our water strategy — making the conclusions fundamentally wrong and misleading” and that a “document’s existence doesn’t guarantee its accuracy or finality.”

Callahan didn’t provide more data on how much water Amazon has used in total over the years. She pointed out that the company is 75 percent toward its goal of becoming water positive, returning 3 gallons for every 4 that it used last year.

In its announcement today, Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon, compares the new Colorado River initiative to the company’s previous climate targets.

”Through the Climate Pledge, we’ve seen what happens when companies tackle a problem together: progress accelerates. We’re bringing that same model to the Colorado River because water and climate are deeply connected,” Hurst says.

Amazon’s carbon footprint, however,grew 16 percentin2025— atrendhappeningacross the tech industry as companies race to make advances in AI.

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