Dive Brief:
- Google announced a goal to replenish more water than it uses by 2030, along with other water stewardship targets on Wednesday, as the tech giant looks to lower the water footprint of its data centers whose demand has increased in tandem with artificial intelligence.
- Google also announced it was investing $17 million into water stewardship projects across seven states, according to a company blog. The company is also reviewing more than 700 projects submitted through a request for information for replenishment projects, from which it will identify early-concept projects that are eligible for co-funding and can come online before 2030.
- Google’s commitment to become “water positive” by the end of the decade puts it on par with competitors and fellow hyperscalers Amazon, Meta and Microsoft who each have their own goals of replenishing more water than they consume by 2030.
Dive Insight:
U.S. data centers directly consumed 66 billion liters of water in 2023, and hyperscale data centers are expected to use between 60 and 124 billion liters of water through direct consumption by 2028, according to a 2024 report from the University of California Berkeley Lab. The report found that U.S. data centers indirectly used nearly an additional 800 billion liters of water from electricity use in 2023.
“Data centers are the nerve centers of the digital world … As we grow our data center footprint to support these services, we recognize that how we build is just as important as what we build,” Google Vice President of Global Infrastructure Bikash Koley and Head of Infrastructure Strategy and Sustainability Ben Townsend wrote in the June 3 blog.
In addition to setting water replenishment goals, Google also committed to help local water utilities modernize their infrastructure, report the company’s annual water consumption and use alternative and reclaimed water options for cooling where possible, according to a company blog.
Google also said it would use air cooling or recycled water to cool data centers in areas whose water resources are considered at-risk. Water cooling is generally preferred over air cooling because it uses approximately 10% less energy, according to the company blog.
“Water is a critical component of data center development and operations,” Koley and Townsend wrote. “Our goal is to minimize our local impacts so that our growth does not come at the expense of the communities we call home.”
The tech company currently has 165 water stewardship projects based in 97 different watersheds. The $17 million in new stewardship projects are based in Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska and Texas, according to the company blog. Google reported replenishing over 7 billion gallons of water in 2025 and expects to replenish over 19 billion gallons of water by 2030 through the implementation of all of its stewardship projects.
Google’s new water stewardship goals come the week after it joined Amazon, Meta and Microsoft in forming the Data Center Innovation Initiative. The initiative will team the hyperscalers, investors and philanthropic groups with startups that are working on sustainable data center technologies. The hyperscalers — all large cloud service providers that operate global data centers — have committed to help pilot the technologies in their data center environments and demonstration sites as part of the initiative.
While corporations have made advances in water stewardship practices in recent years, nonprofit Ceres found in a report that corporate progress on water targets is happening “unevenly and not quickly enough.”
The World Resources Institute found in 2023 that over half of the global population live under “highly water–stressed conditions for at least a month each year. WRI estimates that nearly one-third of the global gross domestic product, $70 trillion, will be exposed to “high water stress” by 2050.
