{"id":9941,"date":"2026-06-13T12:01:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T12:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/?p=9941"},"modified":"2026-06-13T12:01:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T12:01:12","slug":"when-it-comes-to-total-water-use-ai-data-centers-are-a-drop-in-the-bucket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.theck1.no\/?p=9941","title":{"rendered":"When it comes to total water use, AI data centers are a drop in the bucket"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n Kyle Orland
\n <\/strong>
\n •
\nJune 12, 2026\n<\/div>\n\n

If you hang out in any even vaguely AI-skeptical parts of the Internet, you’ve probably stumbled<\/a> on plenty<\/a> of memes<\/a> and posts<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

In a Thursday blog post<\/a>, 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<\/em> gallons of water withdrawn in the US alone in 2015<\/a>. It’s also useful to compare Amazon’s number to stats from more water-intensive areas, from the 3.3 trillion gallons used annually<\/a> on US lawns and landscaping to the 1.3 trillion gallons a year<\/a> used in California almond orchards to the 531 billion gallons a year<\/a> used just for US golf courses.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> in 2024, on top of about 2.75 billion gallons from Microsoft<\/a> and about 1.4 billion gallons from Meta<\/a> in the same year.<\/p>\n

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Kyle Orland • June 12, 2026 If you hang out in any even vaguely AI-skeptical parts of the Internet, you’ve probably stumbled on plenty of memes and posts 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<\/p>\n

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