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Amazon deliberately withheld information about the complete scope of its data centers' water consumption from the public to protect its corporate image, according to an internal document obtained by the Guardian.
The leaked memo reveals that executives at Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud computing arm, debated whether to report what they termed "secondary" water use — the water consumed in generating electricity for the company's data centers — before launching a 2022 sustainability campaign.
Ultimately, leadership opted to publicize only a fraction of the company's water footprint, citing concerns about "reputational risk" if total consumption figures became public knowledge.
The document, dated one month before AWS unveiled its "Water Positive" initiative in November 2022, shows Amazon consumed 105 billion gallons of water in 2021. That volume would supply approximately 958,000 U.S. households annually, comparable to a city larger than San Francisco.
Instead of reporting this total, Amazon disclosed only its primary water use — 7.7 billion gallons per year, roughly equivalent to 11,600 Olympic-sized swimming pools — when measuring progress toward sustainability goals.
The Water Positive campaign committed Amazon to "return more water than it uses" by 2030, targeting a reduction in primary use to 4.9 billion gallons. Secondary water consumption was excluded from these calculations.
Amazon spokeswoman Margaret Callahan disputed the document's relevance, calling it "obsolete" and saying it "completely misrepresents Amazon's current water usage strategy."
"A document's existence doesn't guarantee its accuracy or finality. Meetings often reshape documents or reveal flawed findings or claims," Callahan stated.
Callahan emphasized that the company has implemented efficiency improvements and noted that other corporations similarly do not account for secondary water use in their reporting.
Scientists have criticized the selective disclosure approach and Amazon's decision to omit secondary water consumption from its publicly available figures.
As the world's largest data center operator, Amazon is rapidly expanding its artificial intelligence infrastructure despite growing concerns about water resources needed to cool computing facilities. The company has faced mounting criticism for refusing to disclose total water usage, a transparency measure adopted by competitors Microsoft and Google.
Amazon's Water Positive campaign remains active but continues to exclude secondary water use from its accounting, and the company has not made its overall water consumption public.
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