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AWS and River Partners. Credit: AWS
“Restoring rivers also generates other important benefits like improved flood safety for vulnerable communities, more habitat for species on the brink, increased public health through better access to the outdoors, and much more. River Partners thanks Amazon for its leadership in helping create a thriving future for California.”
To support this announcement, Amazon has also released a playbook sharing best practices and lessons learned so far.
A note of caution
Attempts to increase the amount of clean water in circulation are to be applauded of course, but a degree of caution when interpreting these announcements is advisable for several reasons.
The first is that Amazon chooses not to publish data on its water consumption. The company chooses to focus on efficiency, and AWS has some excellent metrics here, probably because the company has invested serious money into cooling innovation and therefore consumes water more efficiently than other hyperscalers.
However, that doesn’t alter the second reason for careful parsing of this announcement – the fact that the company still consumes billions of litres of water every year and will consume considerably more as its datacentre footprint grows. Again, this doesn’t make Amazon an outlier among hyperscalers, but by investing in these projects Amazon is effectively buying offsets against its own water use, in the way that it, and other cloud providers, invest in renewable energy projects to offset their own use.
All hyperscalers in their ESG reporting overlook the fact that water is consumed in the generation of the vast quantities of power that their datacentres need, as well as on the datacentres to cool the equipment itself. Water used onsite is a fraction of a total datacentres footprint and at present none of the tech giants seem to be keen to find a way to correctly quantify it.
Local communities do have an idea though. The root of many objections to proposed datacentre developments is the strain on the local grid and water supplies. This applies in the UK and Europe but is more resonant in South American countries like Chile, which has been officially in drought since 2010.
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Publish date : 2024-09-19 05:28:00
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