Amazon wanted to keep us in the dark over the true extent of its data centers’ water use, a leaked internal document reveals. Via The Guardian:
The biggest owner of datacenters in the world, Amazon dwarfs competitors Microsoft and Google and is planning a huge increase in capacity as part of a push into artificial intelligence. The Seattle firm operates hundreds of active facilities, with many more in development despite concerns over how much water is being used to cool their vast arrays of circuitry.
Amazon defends its approach and has taken steps to manage how efficient its water use is, but it has faced criticism over transparency. Microsoft and Google regularly publish figures for their water consumption, but Amazon has never publicly disclosed how much water its server farms consume.
When designing a campaign for water efficiency, the company’s cloud computing division chose to account for only a smaller water usage figure that does not include all the ways its datacenters use water so as to minimize the risk to its reputation, according to a leaked memo seen by SourceMaterial and the Guardian.
Amazon as a whole consumed 105bn gallons of water in total in 2021, as much as 958,000 US households, which would make for a city bigger than San Francisco, according to the memo.
And that was five years ago.
Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan described the memo as “obsolete” and said it “completely misrepresents Amazon’s current water usage strategy”.
