Available public records and submitting Freedom of Information Act requests, show that local governments in the commonwealth have allocated at least 19.6 million gallons a day to Amazon.
This, we think, is an underestimate. It doesn’t include at least one large water-cooled data center campus in another nearby county that might end up being leased and operated by Amazon, but is currently being constructed by another company. And it doesn’t include other potential Amazon data center campuses that have not yet been approved or are being held up in court.
Even so, 19.6 million gallons a day seems like a good deal of water. It’s enough to fill 980 backyard swimming pools every day. If the average American uses 82 gallons of water a day, it’s enough to sustain 239,000 people.
But Amazon tells us not to worry. The company has ambitious goals to become “water positive.” To Amazon, this means “replenishing more water to communities than we use in our direct operations.”
But being “water positive” depends on your scale of analysis.
For instance, Louisa County plans to provide seven million gallons a day to two separate Amazon data center campuses. Amazon is paying to construct the new water infrastructure that will make this possible.
On one hand, this is “new” water to Louisa County that wouldn’t otherwise be available for industrial use without Amazon’s funding. But from the perspective of the larger North Anna reservoir and river system, it still constitutes a withdrawal.
While Amazon is using raw water for its operations in Louisa County, in other localities the company is investing in extensive “purple pipe” systems that will capture water that would otherwise be sent downstream in order to circulate it to its data center campuses. The company is proud that it “works with utilities to collect treated wastewater, clean it to appropriate standards, and reuse it to save drinking water.”
