There is currently no public breakdown of U.S. data center water consumption by AI versus non-AI workloads. However, AI appears to account for a minority of total data center compute and electricity demand today, suggesting its share of water consumption is also likely to be a minority, though the exact proportion is unknown.
However I can give some examples of cloud services:
AWS / Amazon data centers used roughly 2.5 billion gallons globally in 2025
All U.S. data centers: about 17.4 billion gallons/year direct water consumption in 2023, projected to reach 38–73 billion gallons/year by 2028. That includes cloud, AI, enterprise, colocation, storage, etc.
NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’d actually be curious as to the share of resources each of these aspects of modern internet architecture use.
I’m just just Google sans AI sucks up some serious water and electricity, I just have no idea how it compares.
Azrael@reddthat.com 2 months ago
There is currently no public breakdown of U.S. data center water consumption by AI versus non-AI workloads. However, AI appears to account for a minority of total data center compute and electricity demand today, suggesting its share of water consumption is also likely to be a minority, though the exact proportion is unknown.
However I can give some examples of cloud services:
AWS / Amazon data centers used roughly 2.5 billion gallons globally in 2025
latitudemedia.com/…/amazon-finally-reports-its-an…
Google data centers used roughly 7.7 billion gallons globally in 2024
latitudemedia.com/…/data-center-water-use-black-b…
All U.S. data centers: about 17.4 billion gallons/year direct water consumption in 2023, projected to reach 38–73 billion gallons/year by 2028. That includes cloud, AI, enterprise, colocation, storage, etc.
mostpolicyinitiative.org/…/data-center-water-use