"Amazon strategised about keeping the public in the dark over the true extent of its datacentres' water use, a leaked internal document reveals. The biggest owner of datacentres in the world, Amazon dwarfs competitors Microsoft and Google and is planning a huge increase in capacity as part of a push into artificial intelligence. The Seattle firm operates hundreds of active facilities, with many more in development despite concerns over how much water is being used to cool their vast arrays of circuitry."
"When designing a campaign for water efficiency, the company's cloud computing division chose to account for only a smaller water usage figure that does not include all the ways its datacentres use water so as to minimise the risk to its reputation, according to a leaked memo seen by SourceMaterial and the Guardian. Amazon as a whole consumed 105bn gallons of water in total in 2021, as much as 958,000 US households, which would make for a city bigger than San Francisco,"
Internal planning at Amazon sought to minimise public disclosure of total datacentre water use by reporting a smaller usage figure that omitted certain water uses to reduce reputational risk. Amazon operates and is developing hundreds of datacentres worldwide and plans a major capacity expansion tied to artificial intelligence. Amazon's corporate water consumption in 2021 amounted to 105bn gallons, equivalent to 958,000 US households. Microsoft and Google publish datacentre water figures while Amazon has not publicly disclosed server-farm water consumption. AWS committed to return more water than it uses by 2030. Amazon said prior strategic planning misrepresents current water strategy.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]