Amazon is spending $20 million to support water conservation on the Colorado River — but still won’t say how much water it uses | Daily Reports Online
- Amazon pledges $20 million to a new Colorado River Basin Collaborative targeting $100 million in two years, with $32 million in commitments so far
- Amazon only reported one figure: 2.5 billion gallons of global data center withdrawals, but no basin, warehouse, historical, or power-generation water figures were made public
- AWS interestingly gives paying customers region-level water data, though it says its basin sites are air-cooled, shifting the onus of water use to power plants it does not currently account for
Amazon has committed $20 million to water conservation in the Colorado River Basin, seeding a new corporate effort it calls the Colorado River Basin Collaborative.
The goal is to raise $100 million within two years for leak repairs, canal lining, and precision irrigation along a river that serves roughly 40 million people and is about to absorb steep new federal delivery cuts.
Amazon’s chief sustainability officer Kara Hurst tied it to the company’s Climate Pledge, arguing that “water and climate are deeply connected.”
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No published figures when it comes to Amazon’s own use of the same water
When asked about its water use, Amazon’s response, interestingly, offered no new information beyond what was already in the public domain from earlier disclosures.
This means the ecommerce and data center giant is unwilling to specify how much water it draws from the same basin where it now funds conservation projects.
Amazon has named two projects so far, both in the Lower Basin. It will spend $2.2 million over three years with the Municipal Water District of Orange County on leak detection and repair, which it expects to save more than 189 million gallons a year once fully in place.
Another $2.4 million goes to agtech company Arable for soil-moisture sensors on tribal farmland that draws from Lake Mead, projected to save about 238 million gallons a year.
Interestingly, Amazon told Arizona Public Media it cannot yet name the tribal recipient because water rights negotiations are ongoing, and the Arable sensors themselves run on AWS.
Together, these two projects total $4.6 million, about 23% of Amazon’s pledge, which means there may be more to come, even though none of it has been earmarked for any publicly named project yet.
The river’s own arithmetic is far larger than what Amazon is looking to resolve: its announcement states that the basin’s supply-demand gap is about 1 trillion gallons a year, making its current contributions a relatively small play at best.
Amazon does provide one figure to account for its use: in June 2026, it disclosed for the first time that its data centers withdrew about 2.5 billion gallons worldwide in 2025, and said withdrawals at the sites it owns and operates fell 2% from 2024.
It claims a water usage effectiveness of 0.12 liters per kilowatt-hour, more than seven times better than its calculated industry average, and says a third party assured its 2025 withdrawal and replenishment data.
Bloomberg reported Amazon’s figure counts both evaporated water and water discharged to wastewater, a more conservative method than some rivals use. AWS’ VP Kerry Person then told Bloomberg that, to read the press, “the data center industry is apparently consuming all of the water in the world,” reflecting its frustration with how it is being portrayed in a post-AI world even as scrutiny grows globally.
With Amazon insisting that it has no water-cooled data centers in the Colorado basin, one also has to account for the fact that it does not disclose the water used by power plants and energy generation projects that support its increasingly power-hungry data center ambitions.
Amazon says it is 75% of the way to being water positive, returning three gallons for every four its data center operations used in 2025. The simplest way to substantiate that in the Colorado River Basin would be to publish what its data centers and warehouses withdraw there. Until it does, the $20 million is a welcome, abeit inadequate contribution to a river in crisis, and an incomplete answer to the question the announcement invites.
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