Cooling the Cloud: Is ‘water positive by 2030’ just a pipedream?
Cooling is becoming less water intensive, but the hyperscale cloud consumes more water every year
Most cloud companies have pledged to return more water to communities than they consume by 2030. But datacentre water consumption is rising inline with corporate thirst for cloud services. How are CSPs doing at making targets for water conservation a reality?
Last week, Computing reported on the growing gap between the pledges made by hyperscale cloud providers and the reality of increased emissions. This week, we turn our attention to water.
The need for the UK to consider water supplies is pressing. Earlier this year, the Environment Agency warned that England’s water supply could run short by 5 billion litres a day by 2055, caused by a combination of a warming climate, population growth and inadequate infrastructure.
Adding to demand for water will be the needs of the datacentres that the government has committed to building, as part of its AI Opportunities Action Plan including AI Growth Zones. Indeed, the pressure on local water supplies is one of the reasons that those living nearby to proposed datacentres are resisting them so fiercely.
This objection isn’t irrational. Datacentres already consume vast quantities of water, mainly for cooling, and much of it is used in evaporative cooling systems. Whilst evaporated water eventually returns to earth in the form of rain, it is removed from the local water balance. This makes it different from domestic household water use where water is recycled through treatment centres.
Computing’s 2025 cloud sustainability research looked at the water withdrawal and Water Use Effectiveness (WUE) of ten cloud companies in the financial year to 2023, the data for which was the basis of 2024’s sustainability reporting.
WUE is obtained by dividing litres of water used by the kilowatt hours of energy consumed.
Both metrics are necessary to obtain the full picture of the impact of cloud datacentres on water supplies. Whilst it is important to know how efficiently datacentres are using the water they take from local regions, particularly if those datacentres are in areas of high-water stress, the total amount of water consumed matters.
An absence of an overall water consumption also prevents journalists or any other interested party holding companies accountable for progress (or not) towards water positivity targets.
Hyperscale water consumption
Water metrics for the three hyperscalers can be seen below. In all cases where data is made available, we can see that water consumption has increased.
Amazon
Amazon chooses not to publish data on consumption so we can’t see if water consumption has increased.
Computing reached out to Amazon to ask for water consumption data and received the following response from an AWS spokesperson.
“Total water volume is not the right metric. With that metric, smaller organisations use a small amount of water and larger organizations will use a big amount of water which can disguise inefficiencies. What is important is the efficiency and how effective an organization is at conserving water, which is only possible to understand with WUE.”
In fairness to Amazon, its published WUE in 2024 of 0.18 is low and has steadily decreased since 2020. This must reflect greater innovation and progress in more water efficient cooling systems. AWS has innovated with direct-to-chip cooling and the company recently unveiled an in-house designed liquid cooling systems called IRHX (In Row Heat Exchanger) which is a rack-level liquid-cooling platform engineered to support AWS’s highest-density AI training and inference instances built around NVIDIA’s Blackwell GPUs.
This would not be reflected in the data available here which is two years old so the chances are AWS’s average WUE (and indeed PUE) will continue to reduce in the next couple of years of reporting.
AWS also uses reclaimed, treated wastewater for cooling where it’s viable.
Nonetheless, if Amazon continues to avoid publishing its overall water consumption figures it will be impossible to hold the company accountable for progress towards its pledges.
Microsoft
Microsoft is on a similar trajectory to Amazon, with overall water consumption increasing as 2030 targets loom larger on the horizon – a fact acknowledged in the 2024 report by Microsoft Vice-Chair and President Brad Smith and Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa in their foreword.
Microsoft uses a variety of cooling methods including traditional air conditioning, direct-to-chip, immersion, adiabatic (which is another evaporative method) and free air cooling. Not only does WUE comparison indicate that Microsoft is being out innovated by AWS, the company also admits that 42% of its overall water consumption was from areas of high-water stress such as Arizona and California.
In 2024 Microsoft began to roll out zero-water cooling systems which are effectively closed loops that recycle coolant. Again, we’d expect to see average WUE drop over the next few years as more new datacentres with water free cooling are brought online.
It’s hard to emphasise how much the water consumption of both Microsoft and AWS pales into insignificance when compared with that of Google.
Googe’s operation consumes almost four times as much water as Microsoft’s. This fact is not easy to determine because Google reports its water use in million gallons as opposed to megalitres. If you gave the numbers a cursory glance, you’d be forgiven for assuming that Google's datacentres consume slightly less water than those of its hyperscale competitors.
No WUE is given so we can assume that Google datacentres are not consuming water more efficiently than their hyperscale competitors. In fact, given the scale of difference, it’s fair to assume the opposite.
In addition to building datecentres which consume water more efficiently, all three hyperscalers fund projects globally which replenish water in communities around the world.
Tier 2 cloud services
Our research this year extended to a second tier of companies, for which cloud services form an increasing proportion of revenues but are not cloud native organisation. The only exception to this is Salesforce which started life as a SaaS but has since expanded to offer PaaS as part of a wider cloud ecosystem.
These companies provide far less data and information of water consumption than their hyperscale peers.
IBM
IBMs only published target on water data is to achieve a year-to-year reduction in water withdrawals at larger IBM locations in water-stressed regions. This is in contrast to robust targets for carbon reduction which IBM is doing well in progressing towards.
No water data is provided at all other than an acknowledgement that water withdrawal from highly stressed regions increased by 3.4%.
Lenovo
Lenovo is another organisation which, like IBM, is traditionally associated with hardware but has built an array of services based on public, private and hybrid cloud provision. Lenovo has pledged to maintain a per‑person water withdrawal to not exceed a 5% increase year‑over‑year.
The company has stayed within the letter of this target if not the spirit. Total water withdrawal reduced from 1,499ML in FY 22/23 to 1,420ML in FY 23/24. However, water consumption increased from 18 to 20 ML and 51% of withdrawal was in high water stress areas.
Whilst water consumption increased, the actual volume of water consumed looks tiny in comparison to the likes of Google.
Salesforce
Like its peers, Salesforce does not publish a target relating to water consumption.
The company says that it consumed 153 million gallons of water in FY24, an increase from 26 million gallons in the previous year. Converted to megaliters for comparison this year's consumption is 579ML.
35% of that water was taken from areas with high or very high-water stress.
Oracle
Oracle’s water consumption increased by approximately one third – 225.4ML. That takes the company’s overall water consumption to 545.5ML.
As is the case with every cloud vendor in this bracket, Oracle doesn’t publish a target to reduce its overall water consumption. Its only target is to reduce potable water use by 33% per square foot. No timescale is given or any indication of progress towards that target.
Euro cloud services
The final three cloud providers contained within the 2025 analysis are all headquartered in mainland Europe. None of them publish targets for water reduction and none published water data for financial year 22/23 so these areas have been removed from the table below.
OVHCloud
OVHCloud is an increasingly significant CSP and came out top of the sustainability rankings as a whole.
OVHCloud outperformed its peers and the hyperscale cloud companies because its vertically integrated operating model gives it considerable control of the environmental footprint of each component. It is, according to Global Environmental Director. Grégory Lebourg, a model which is frugal by design.
Like its EU based peers, OVHCloud only began publishing it's total water consumption in 2024, so data to enable a comparison year-on-year is not available. However, the company used 125.7ML. Oddly WUE has dropped back slightly from 0.3 to 0.37.
UpCloud
Upcloud is a Finnish cloud company which reached revenues of more than $20m in 2024. No environmental metrics are provided by the company. Computing reached out to Upcloud to ask for further details and a spokesperson said:
“We have recently started our ESG program, and in the midst of fully establishing the program. Currently, we are unable to provide you with the full extent of data requested. We would be happy to take part in future research.”
IONOS
IONOS is headquartered in Germany and began life as an ISP before branching out into hosting and cloud computing. Revenue reached €1.56 billion for 2024 with much of that growth coming from the cloud business.
IONOS publishes a WUE of 0.03 which is astoundingly low. Computing reached out to ask for further information and IONOS confirmed datacentre water consumption of 265,464.56 litres which equates to 0.27ML. A spokesperson also said:
“It's worth noting that the majority of this usage (98.8%) came from the last one of our data centres to still be using water-based cooling during the first months of 2024. We're pleased to report that, as of now, all our data centres have transitioned to alternative cooling methods and no longer use water-based cooling.”