Amazon cloud customers can now see their water withdrawal data

This is not about home energy upgrades, but it touches on a topic connected to them: the water and electricity used by big data centers, the kind that power cloud computing and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.

Amazon Web Services now lets business customers see how much water their cloud accounts use, through a dashboard called the AWS Sustainability Console. The "withdrawal" numbers cover water used to cool data centers and for other purposes, like fire protection tanks. Amazon built its own method for calculating this, similar to how it already estimates the greenhouse gas emissions tied to customer accounts, and it offers historical data back to January 2022.

The bigger picture: data centers run by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft use large amounts of both water and electricity, and the two are linked, since some cooling systems that save water use more power, and vice versa. All three companies have promised to cut freshwater use in their data centers. Microsoft has built a closed-loop cooling system for AI facilities and publishes water-use data for certain AI queries. Google says it replenished more freshwater than it used in 2025 through projects in water-stressed areas, but does not share water data for individual customers the way Amazon now does.

None of this changes anything about home energy programs or rebates. It is a sign that the companies behind cloud and AI services are facing more pressure over their resource use, as that use keeps growing alongside demand for artificial intelligence.