Amazon announced a series of milestones towards its water-focused sustainability goals, including reaching 75% in 2025 towards its “water positive” target to return more water than it uses in its data center operations by 2030, and more than doubling its data center water efficiency since 2021.
Amazon initially set its water positive goal in 2022, setting out a strategy to achieve its target based on key aspects including improving water efficiency, using sustainable water sources, returning water for community reuse and supporting water replenishment projects.
The new milestone marks significant a significant jump in progress towards the water positive goal in the past year, with the company announcing last year that had reached 53% in 2024.
Amazon revealed that it withdrew about 2.5 billion gallons (9.5 billion liters) across its global data center footprint during 2025. To help reach its water positive goal, the company outlined a series of initiatives it has been pursuing to capture water that would be otherwise wasted and return it to communities, including investing in over 50 water projects expected to return more than 5.8 billion gallons of water annually, and using water in its operations that would otherwise be unusable, such as reclaimed water sourced from wastewater treatment plants instead of using drinkable water.
In addition to advancing on its water replenishment goals, the company also outlined its initiatives to reduce the amount of water it uses in data centers, revealing that it has achieved a 52% improvement in water efficiency since 2021, reaching 0.12 liters per kWh, down from 0.25 l/kWh, and 7x ahead of the industry average 0.84 l/kWh.
In order to reduce the use of water for data centers, Amazon said that it uses “free air cooling” 90% of the time, running air past its servers to absorb heat and pumping it back outside. For the remaining 10%, when the air is too hot, Amazon said that it uses “evaporative cooling,” in which water is sprayed onto an absorbent medium, which pulls heat from air that is passed through it as the water evaporates.
Amazon also said that it has been working to raise the temperature thresholds at which its data center operate, enabling servers to tolerate more heat, and reducing the amount of time that water is needed to cool them down.
Amazon Chief Sustainability Officer Kara Hurst said:
“We’ve been working on water for a long time, and that’s helped us gain efficiency. It’s also taught us that solutions don’t lie in one single practice, innovation, or idea. We focus on multiple approaches – from data center operations to investing in community replenishment projects – because making a real impact requires holistic thinking. And while we’re doing this in the best way possible, we also know we have to keep innovating – because the world keeps changing.”
