When it comes to total water use, AI data centers are a drop in the bucket

Amazon reported Thursday that its data centers withdrew approximately 2.5 billion gallons of water globally in 2025, a figure that represents a fraction of the 117 trillion gallons withdrawn in the U.S. alone in 2015. The company’s disclosure comes amid widespread online memes and posts warning that AI data centers are depleting water supplies through evaporative cooling, though the report shows total data center water use remains negligible compared to sectors like U.S. lawn irrigation, which consumes 3.3 trillion gallons annually.

If you hang out in any even vaguely AI-skeptical parts of the Internet, you’ve probably stumbled https://www.threads.com/@hardluckpete/post/DUl7vN3jpx5/people-say-ai-is-stealing-all-the-water-reality-check-my-entire-ai-usage-equals?hl=zh-hk on plenty https://www.instagram.com/p/DZN4K3vjDb3/ of memes https://www.facebook.com/loudandsmart/photos/dont-mess-with-humanity-/1365982698308185/ and posts https://robertvanwey.substack.com/p/artificial-thirst premised on data centers’ insatiable thirst for water to power evaporative cooling. But a new report from Amazon highlights just how little water all these AI data centers are using in aggregate, on a relative basis, even as individual data centers can strain local water supplies. In a Thursday blog post https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/sustainability/amazon-data-center-water-usage , Amazon claims its data centers withdrew “about 2.5 billion gallons” globally in 2025. That number sounds incredibly large at first glance, but it looks downright puny compared to the 117 trillion gallons of water withdrawn in the US alone in 2015 https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/cir1441 . It’s also useful to compare Amazon’s number to stats from more water-intensive areas, from the 3.3 trillion gallons used annually https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/www3/watersense/pubs/outdoor.html on US lawns and landscaping to the 1.3 trillion gallons a year https://www.c-win.org/cwin-water-blog/2024/9/23/california-almond-water-usage-updated used in California almond orchards to the 531 billion gallons a year https://www.gcsaa.org/who-we-are/media/news-release/2025-news-releases/2025/12/30/golf-courses-reduce-water-usage-by-31-percent-according-to-national-survey used just for US golf courses. Amazon is just one company, of course, and a relative latecomer to reporting its data center water usage numbers. Google data centers withdrew about more than 6.1 billion gallons of water https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2025-environmental-report.pdf in 2024, on top of about 2.75 billion gallons from Microsoft https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/technology/microsoft-water-ai-data-centers.html and about 1.4 billion gallons from Meta https://sustainability.atmeta.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Meta 2025-Environmental-Data-Index.pdf in the same year. All told, a 2021 Nature study https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-021-00101-w estimates that all US data centers combined consumed about 163 billion gallons of water that year, a number that includes “indirect” consumption from non-renewable power sources. That number has doubtlessly increased in the AI-driven years since that study was published— one analysis https://harcresearch.org/research/powering-texas-digital-economy-data-centers-and-the-future-of-the-grid/ estimates that Texas data centers alone used 25 to 49 billion gallons in 2024, and could grow to withdraw 399 billion gallons in 2030. But even annual data center water usage measured in the trillions would represent a figurative and kind of literal drop in the bucket compared to national and worldwide water usage statistics.