If your data centers are guzzling more water than a major US city, you face a choice: come clean to the public and risk bad press — or hide the evidence to keep key figures in the green.

For Amazon executives, evidently, the answer is to bury the data down far beneath the water table.

According to a document leaked to The Guardian, Amazon’s execs exchanged notes about keeping the masses ignorant about the “true extent” of the staggering amount of water their data centers use.

The 2022 memo, viewed by the Guardian as well as the investigative non-profit SourceMaterial, found that Amazon used 105 billion gallons of water in 2021, as much as 958,000 US households or a “city bigger than San Francisco,” as the document put it.

However, in the run-up to a November 2022 PR campaign called “Water Positive,” Amazon only disclosed 7.7 billion gallons of water use per year — an enormous discrepancy. The gulf, executives explained to each other, was owed to “secondary water sources,” or water used to generate the electricity to run the corporation’s power-hungry data centers.

The two publications report that creative accounting was done to ease executive’s anxieties about “reputational risk,” fearing bad publicity if the true numbers ever saw the light of day. The paper even included theoretical headlines should they ever be caught lying about its water use, like one which read “Amazon hides its water consumption.”

Since 2021, the company’s data center footprint has expanded massively. Though Amazon doesn’t make information about its data center expansion public, it’s poured tens of billions of dollars into new facilities in recent years, meaning we can safely assume its water usage has only increased.

Speaking to the Guardian, an Amazon spokesperson said the memo “completely misrepresents Amazon’s current water usage strategy.” They added that the 2022 document was now “obsolete,” but declined to explain what exactly was outdated and why.

By far the largest operator of data centers around the globe, Amazon has no legal incentive to share water usage numbers with the public under US law. The $2.4 trillion megacorp has never purposefully disclosed the full extent of its water usage to the public, but has previously been criticized for lying about secondary water use in 2024.

It’s a depressingly familiar story: massive corporations that ravage the planet have no real incentive to reveal the countless ways they exploit its resources for profit. Speaking with Vox, anti-trust journalist Barry C Lynn said Amazon and tech companies like it wield power similar to “absolute monarchs,” arguing that they create barriers to democratic governance and equal opportunity.

It’s a sad fact that under the undemocratic rule of monopoly capitalism, a few accidentally leaked memos may be the only thing standing between us and total ignorance.

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