Amazon Pledges $20 Million to Colorado River Amid Water Use Secrecy
AI-generated image · Bay Street Wire
The tech giant launches a conservation collaborative as critics point to a lack of transparency regarding total water consumption in data centers.
As first reported by The Verge, Amazon has announced the launch of the Colorado River Basin Collaborative, pledging $20 million of its own funds toward water conservation projects. The company aims to raise a total of $100 million over two years for the initiative, which targets a watershed that serves 40 million people across the Western U.S. and Mexico. According to The Verge, the Colorado River has faced an "unprecedented" drought for 26 years, leading the U.S. Department of the Interior to mandate water cuts for California, Nevada, and Arizona in August.
While Amazon has set a goal to be "water positive" by the end of the decade, the company has faced criticism over its disclosure practices. The Verge reports that Amazon's annual sustainability reports provide water use per unit of power for data centers since 2021, but omit the company's total water use for that period. In June, Amazon disclosed that its global data centers used 2.5 billion gallons of water in 2025.
Further scrutiny comes from a 2025 Guardian investigation, which alleges Amazon executives avoided accounting for "secondary" water use—the water required to generate electricity—to mitigate "reputational risk." This contrasts with other tech giants; The Verge notes that Microsoft discloses total data center water use since 2020, and Google provides global operational water use since 2021 with location-specific breakdowns.
As AI demand increases, water consumption is under the microscope. One estimate cited by The Verge suggests AI used between 312.5 billion and 764.6 billion liters of water in 2025. In Orange County, California, Amazon has additionally pledged $2.2 million over three years to fix leaks, which the company claims will save 189 million gallons of water annually.