Amazon is putting $20 million into a Colorado River Basin Collaborative it launched today and wants the effort to reach $100 million within two years, aimed at a river that supplies 40 million people and has been in drought for 26 years, according to Justine Calma at The Verge. The UN-backed Water Resilience Coalition, which Amazon is joining alongside Microsoft and Meta, will vet the projects companies fund. Amazon still doesn’t publish how much water it uses in total, reporting liters per kilowatt-hour instead, and the 2.5 billion gallons it gave for its data centers in June excludes the water used generating their electricity, which is where most data center water actually goes. Microsoft and Google both disclose total data center water use.
