Amazon plans to allocate $20 million for Colorado water conservation — The Verge
Amazon plans to invest $20 million in water conservation projects in the Colorado River Basin in the United States. The company also announced the creation of the Colorado River Basin Collaborative, an initiative intended to raise $100 million over two years for water conservation projects, The Verge reports.
Projects in the Colorado Basin
The Colorado River, which is about 1,400 miles long, supplies water to 40 million people in seven U.S. states and two Mexican states. According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the river has experienced an unprecedented drought over the past 26 years. The situation has been worsened by years of water overuse and human-caused climate change.
In August, the U.S. Department of the Interior approved a plan providing for significant reductions in water allocations for Arizona, Nevada, and California. In Orange County, California, Amazon pledged $2.2 million over three years to identify and repair leaks. The company estimates this will save 189 million gallons of water annually.
Participants in the new initiative will be able to independently make agreements with water conservation projects of their choice. They will be vetted by the UN-backed Water Resilience Coalition. Amazon will also join the coalition, whose members include Microsoft, Meta, and other companies.
More current news is available on the UA.News Telegram channel Telegram.
Water use by data centers
The initiative was announced amid increased scrutiny of the volumes of water used by technology companies and their data centers. In June, Amazon reported that in 2025 its data centers worldwide, including owned, leased, and shared facilities, used 2.5 billion gallons of water. According to the company, data centers it directly owns and operates reduced water use by 2% compared with the previous year.
Amazon also reported a 52% improvement in data center water efficiency since 2021 and said it uses 0.12 liters of water per kilowatt-hour of electricity. At the same time, its annual sustainability report includes a metric for water use per unit of energy but does not disclose the total volume of water used by the company in previous years.
A 2025 investigation by The Guardian claimed that Amazon did not account for water used to generate electricity when assessing progress toward its own environmental goals. According to the publication, an internal document estimated that Amazon used 10.5 billion gallons of water in 2021. Amazon representative Margaret Callahan called the investigation's findings inaccurate and based on selective data from an outdated document.
