{"id":6289,"date":"2025-10-28T18:26:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-28T18:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/leak-amazon-hides-water-consumption\/"},"modified":"2025-10-28T18:26:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T18:26:11","slug":"leak-amazon-hides-water-consumption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/leak-amazon-hides-water-consumption\/","title":{"rendered":"Leaked Document Shows Amazon Scheming to Keep AI Data Center Water Use Secret"},"content":{"rendered":"
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If your data centers are guzzling more water than a major US city, you face a choice: come clean to the public and risk bad press \u2014 or hide the evidence to <\/strong>keep key figures in the green.<\/p>\n

For Amazon executives, evidently, the answer is to bury the data down far beneath the water table.<\/p>\n

According to a document leaked to The Guardian<\/em><\/a>, Amazon\u2019s execs exchanged notes about keeping the masses ignorant about the \u201ctrue extent\u201d of the staggering amount of water their data centers use.<\/p>\n

The 2022 memo, viewed by the Guardian <\/em>as well as the investigative non-profit SourceMaterial<\/a><\/em>, found that Amazon used 105 billion gallons of water in 2021, as much as 958,000 US households or a \u201ccity bigger than San Francisco,\u201d as the document put it.<\/p>\n

However, in the run-up to a November 2022 PR campaign called \u201cWater Positive,\u201d Amazon only disclosed 7.7 billion gallons of water use per year \u2014 an enormous discrepancy. The gulf, executives explained to each other, was owed to \u201csecondary water sources,\u201d or water used to generate the electricity to run the corporation\u2019s power-hungry<\/a> data centers.<\/p>\n

The two publications report that creative accounting was done to ease executive\u2019s anxieties about \u201creputational risk,\u201d fearing bad publicity if the true numbers ever saw the light of day. The paper even included theoretical headlines should they ever be caught lying about its water use, like one which read \u201cAmazon hides its water consumption.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since 2021, the company\u2019s data center footprint has expanded massively. Though Amazon doesn\u2019t make information about its data center expansion public, it\u2019s poured tens of billions of dollars<\/a> into new facilities in recent years, meaning we can safely assume its water usage has only increased.<\/p>\n

Speaking to the Guardian<\/em>, an Amazon spokesperson said the memo \u201ccompletely misrepresents Amazon\u2019s current water usage strategy.\u201d They added that the 2022 document was now \u201cobsolete,\u201d but declined to explain what exactly was outdated and why.<\/p>\n

By far the largest operator of data centers around the globe, Amazon has no legal incentive to share water usage numbers with the public under US law. The $2.4 trillion megacorp has never purposefully disclosed the full extent of its water usage to the public, but has previously been criticized for lying about secondary water use<\/a> in 2024.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a depressingly familiar story: massive corporations that ravage the planet have no real incentive<\/a> to reveal the countless ways they exploit its resources for profit. Speaking with Vox<\/em><\/a>, anti-trust journalist Barry C Lynn said Amazon and tech companies like it wield power similar to \u201cabsolute monarchs,\u201d arguing that they create barriers to democratic governance and equal opportunity.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sad fact that under the undemocratic rule of monopoly capitalism<\/a>, a few accidentally leaked memos may be the only thing standing between us and total ignorance.<\/p>\n

More on Amazon: <\/strong>AWS Outage That Took Down Internet Came After Amazon Fired Tons of Workers in Favor of AI<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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The post Leaked Document Shows Amazon Scheming to Keep AI Data Center Water Use Secret<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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