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The AI boom has a thirst problem. After spending much of the past year defending the staggering electricity demands of their data centers, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are now facing a second front: water.
The numbers tell the story
Amazon reported that its data centers withdrew approximately 2.5 billion gallons of water in 2025. That’s actually a 2% decrease from the previous year, and the company pointed to an efficiency metric of 0.12 liters of water per kilowatt-hour as evidence of progress.
Google’s numbers paint a different picture. The search giant consumed 7.2 billion gallons of freshwater in 2024, though it claims to have replenished about 4.5 billion gallons. That works out to a 64% replenishment rate, which sounds impressive until you realize the remaining 2.7 billion gallons simply vanished into the cooling apparatus of the AI machine.
Zoom out further and the aggregate figures get genuinely startling. Data centers across North America consumed nearly 1 trillion liters of water in 2025. For context, that’s roughly equivalent to New York City’s entire annual water consumption.
And the expansion is far from over. An analysis by SourceMaterial and the Guardian identified approximately 38 active and 24 planned big-tech data centers located in water-scarce regions globally. These facilities are part of a broader push that could see data center counts increase by roughly 78%.
Investors are asking those questions
In April 2026, over a dozen investors filed shareholder resolutions urging Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to disclose site-specific water and power usage data for their US data centers. The push for granular, location-level transparency signals that broad corporate sustainability reports are no longer cutting it.
The logic is straightforward. A data center drawing 100 million gallons annually in water-rich Oregon is a fundamentally different proposition than one doing the same in drought-prone Arizona. Aggregate numbers obscure the local impact, and investors want to see the receipts.
Each company has taken a slightly different approach to managing the narrative. Amazon is leaning into efficiency improvements, pointing to the year-over-year decline in absolute water use as proof that growth and conservation can coexist. Google is emphasizing its replenishment programs, essentially trying to put water back into the ecosystems it draws from.
Why this matters beyond big tech
Investors evaluating tech stocks should be watching two things closely. First, whether the shareholder resolutions demanding site-level disclosures gain enough traction to force compliance. Second, whether any state or federal regulators begin incorporating water-use standards into data center permitting processes.
A 78% planned increase in data center counts doesn’t happen quietly. The electricity fight was round one. Water is shaping up to be round two.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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