Amazon Web Services (AWS) has updated its environmental reporting dashboard to provide customers with annual data about water withdrawals attributed to their cloud computing activities.
The new information is part of the AWS Sustainability Console, which Amazon launched in March in response to customer requests about the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with their accounts.
Amazon collaborated with utilities and uses telemetry to gather data for the new metrics, said Alexis Bateman, head of global sustainability for AWS. The “withdrawals” figures include water involved in data center cooling and other uses, such as filling up a fire protection tank.
“We really wanted to target some of the key data points that customers were asking for,” she said.
Proprietary method
AWS developed its own methodology to calculate the water information, borrowing from the third-party assured approach it uses to estimate carbon emissions. The information can be downloaded by sustainability teams for use in their own environmental metric accounting; AWS provides historical data back to January 2022.
“It completes our existing measurements of GHG emissions and energy consumption, giving us a fall picture of our environmental impact and allows us to identify and prevent negative trade-offs, ensuring we create holistic solutions rather than shifting problems from one resource to another,” said Celine Lescop, global digital sustainability executive lead with French insurance company AXA.
Water-energy balance
Water and energy consumption have emerged as flash points for the three largest cloud computing companies, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, as they expand their artificial intelligence capacity.
Managing the water and electricity in data centers is tricky, because some systems that reduce freshwater withdrawals can result in higher energy consumption. Data center operations must balance power usage effectiveness, which tracks how much electricity is used for cooling versus running equipment, and water usage effectiveness.
Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all pledged to withdraw less freshwater for cooling equipment in their data centers.
Microsoft developed a new closed loop system for its AI facilities, while AWS boasts the best water efficiency score, meaning it uses less water on average for operations than its rivals. Google replenished the most freshwater in 2025, through projects in water-stressed regions.
Customers and communities are pushing for far more data, which is what drove the creation of the new AWS tool, Bateman said. The company will continue to add new metrics; future data, for example, might reflect monthly withdrawals.
Google does not share customer-specific water data. Microsoft publishes information about how much water is consumed by certain Copilot artificial intelligence queries; it also publishes location-specific data. Customers can use that information to estimate their related water impact.
