Water Intelligence
Data Center Water Usage
The 5 largest cloud data center operators withdraw billions of gallons of water annually to cool their servers. Here's what that costs in water — per gigabyte.
Total Annual Withdrawal
25.5B gal
Top 5 operators combined
Total Consumed
20.6B gal
Water not returned to source
Combined IT Capacity
18.8 GW
Megawatts of compute power
= Olympic Pools
31,192
660K gal each
Annual Water Withdrawal vs. Consumption
Withdrawal = total taken from source. Consumption = water that evaporates and is not returned.
- Withdrawal (B gal)
- Consumed (B gal)
Why Cooling Towers Consume So Much Water
Data centers generate massive heat. Evaporative cooling — the most common and cost-effective method — removes that heat by evaporating water into the air. For every MW of IT load, a typical facility evaporates 400–500 gallons per hour. At scale, this is equivalent to entire municipal water supplies. AWS alone consumes more fresh water than many mid-sized US cities.