Amazon announces six new water replenishment projects in South America and China
But lots of questions remain on datacentre impact on local water supplies
Amazon has announced six new AWS water replenishment projects focused on high-risk areas in the US, South America, and China. Whilst the projects will return billions of litres of water annually, Amazon remains opaque on the extent of its overall water take.
The projects are run in conjunction with local non-profit organisations and are due to return approximately seven billion litres of clean water every year when added to the 15 water replenishment projects already in place which last year returned 3.5bn litres of water to local communities.
The announcement should be seen within the context of Amazon’s stated objective of being water positive by 2030, a target shared by its biggest competitors in the cloud space, notably Microsoft and Google.
The projects cover several water-stressed regions. The Santiago and Valparaiso regions of Chile (and it is in the former that AWS secured permission earlier this year to open two datacentres) are dependent on the Maipo Basin for both potable water and irrigation. AWS is partnering with local farmers and climate-tech company Kilimo to reduce water use in the basin. About 67 hectares of agricultural land will be converted from flood to drip irrigation, resulting in an estimated 200 million litres of water saved each year.
AWS is also partnering with Kilimo in Brazil—this time using Artificial Intelligence (AI). Again, the focus is on a river, the Tiete River which servers San Paulo, which is Brazil’s most populous city.
Kilimo’s AI solution built on AWS will calculate water consumption, monitor soil quality, and provide irrigation recommendations through intelligent monitoring for participating farmers. Again, this is expected to conserve approximately two hundred million litres of water annually.
Kilimo CEE Jairo Trad, commented on the Brazil project:
“This project will help AWS improve water security in the watershed São Paulo. We are excited not only because we continue to strengthen our relationship with AWS but also because this aligns with our plan to enter Brazil, a country with many challenges in water conservation."
First water replenishment projects in China
AWS has also announced its first water projects in China. The first, in conjunction with the Beijing LongTech Environmental Technology Co. Ltd, will reconstruct degraded portions of riverbank and install wetlands and buffer zones around the Miyun Reservoir in Beijing to protect the reservoir from agricultural runoff.
A second project in China consisting of two constructed wetland efforts that will treat flows of untreated sewage flowing into neighbouring rivers, the Dongjiang and Xijiang. These efforts are being implemented with the NGO GreenCitiy Guangzhou and are due to complete in 2026.
Each of the projects in China should return around 40 million litres of water every year when complete.
The announcement also covers some US projects to improve wetland habitats in Ohio, and repair native ecosystems via the regeneration of specific river corridors in California which have become increasingly threatened.
“Amazon’s bold water investment comes at a critical time for California,” said River Partners President Julie Rentner. “A changing climate is having profound impacts on our unique ecosystems, communities, and natural resources. Bringing Central Valley rivers back to life presents a powerful, proven solution to achieve water sustainability in tangible ways.”
“Restoring rivers also generates other important benefits like improved flood safety for vulnerable communities, more habitat for species on the brink, increased public health through better access to the outdoors, and much more. River Partners thanks Amazon for its leadership in helping create a thriving future for California.”
To support this announcement, Amazon has also released a playbook sharing best practices and lessons learned so far.
A note of caution
Attempts to increase the amount of clean water in circulation are to be applauded of course, but a degree of caution when interpreting these announcements is advisable for several reasons.
The first is that Amazon chooses not to publish data on its water consumption. The company chooses to focus on efficiency, and AWS has some excellent metrics here, probably because the company has invested serious money into cooling innovation and therefore consumes water more efficiently than other hyperscalers.
However, that doesn't alter the second reason for careful parsing of this announcement – the fact that the company still consumes billions of litres of water every year and will consume considerably more as its datacentre footprint grows. Again, this doesn’t make Amazon an outlier among hyperscalers, but by investing in these projects Amazon is effectively buying offsets against its own water use, in the way that it, and other cloud providers, invest in renewable energy projects to offset their own use.
All hyperscalers in their ESG reporting overlook the fact that water is consumed in the generation of the vast quantities of power that their datacentres need, as well as on the datacentres to cool the equipment itself. Water used onsite is a fraction of a total datacentres footprint and at present none of the tech giants seem to be keen to find a way to correctly quantify it.
Local communities do have an idea though. The root of many objections to proposed datacentre developments is the strain on the local grid and water supplies. This applies in the UK and Europe but is more resonant in South American countries like Chile, which has been officially in drought since 2010.