At a time when international tech companies are under growing pressure to expand their resource-hungry AI data centres, Amazon said on Friday that its Indian operations had achieved a significant milestone in water conservation.
This year, the U.S.-based corporation declared that it had become “water positive” in India, which means that its operations—which include data centres, corporate offices, and warehouses—return more water to communities than they consume.
It claimed that by lowering water use at its facilities and implementing initiatives like efficient irrigation and watershed restoration, it achieved the objective a year ahead of schedule.
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According to a Reuters investigation earlier this year, corporations including Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet’s Google are receiving criticism from activists and shareholders regarding the environmental effects of data center construction.
By 2030, Amazon wants all of its data center operations to be water positive worldwide. According to the company, water is not used to cool its data centers in India.
India, which is home to 18% of the world’s population but only 4% of its freshwater resources, has a particularly serious water problem.
Rationing and shortages are common during the summer, but this year is especially bad because of a strong El Nino that caused insufficient monsoon rainfall.
Karnataka, which is home to Bengaluru, a software hub, and Maharashtra, which is home to Mumbai, the financial capital, are two of the most severely affected states. Authorities claimed last week that Mumbai, which has an estimated population of 1.3 crore, only had 40 days worth of water left.
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In order to increase AI capabilities and exports, Amazon intends to invest over $35 billion in India by 2030.
The government announced this year that Amazon’s cloud services provider, Amazon Web Services, intends to invest over $8.2 billion in Maharashtra.
Over the past year, Microsoft and Google have also revealed significant data center investments in India.
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