There are a lot of questions in this comments section about how data centers use water and how they are cooled.

At least some of this information is available at resources like these:

https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption

https://www.fwpcoa.org/content.aspx?page_id=5&club_id=859275&item_id=130961

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ai-data-centers-and-water/

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-data-center-water

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1

https://eng.ox.ac.uk/case-studies/the-true-cost-of-water-guzzling-data-centres

It appears they that are using both fresh/potable water and grey water where available and that not all of a data centers water consumption is to do with cooling of servers. There’s also electricity generation and extraneous water usage on site.

Amazon’s AWS is at least no small portion of the internets infrastructure (30% of web infrastructure world wide). So I was cautious about whether this total was for all of their data centers or just for ones that run AI.

I’ve read three articles so far reporting on this and none of them make it clear Amazon is reporting their total water usage for all their data centers world wide (I suspect it’s this one), or if they specify the water usage of AI data centers.