On Monday, online retail titan Amazon launched the “Colorado River Basin Collaborative,” an initiative that plans to invest millions of dollars into water conservation projects for communities that rely on the shrinking Colorado River.
The goal, according to the company, is to show how the private sector can help solve big water problems.
“If you’re a company that operates in the basin that has customers in the basin, that benefits from the Colorado River in one way or the other, we think there’s a responsibility to help solve those problems,” said Will Hewes, water stewardship lead for Amazon.
So far, 10 companies across various industries have invested into the collaborative, which hopes to raise $100 million over the next two years.
Amazon has already invested 20% of that goal into the fund and $2.4 million into irrigation technology that could help farmers curb their water use in Arizona.
Using soil-moisture sensing technology from Arable, an agricultural technology company, farmers on tribal land in the Lower Colorado River Basin could cut back on about 20% of the water that they typically use from Lake Mead annually, Hewes said.
Amazon could not yet disclose who the recipient of the Arizona award is, “due to ongoing water rights negotiations,” according to a spokesperson with the company.
“We’ve partnered with Arable on a number of these projects already,” Hewes said, pointing to other water conservation projects in Indiana and Mississippi. “We’re really just starting to get the data in now from what those savings are.”
The AI-powered sensors from Arable rely on Amazon Web Services data centers to function.
Hewes told AZPM that Amazon does not currently have any water-cooled data centers operating in the Colorado River Basin. He could not confirm how many existing or planned data centers are in the region.
“We do have a relatively modest footprint that uses air cooling, and that is a decision that gets made based on water resources in that community, about which cooling strategy to go with,” Hewes said.
Hewes said an average Amazon Web Services data center withdraws about 4.5 million gallons of water annually.
Earlier this year, Amazon disclosed that its data centers used a total of 2.5 billion gallons of water globally in 2025.
The water footprint of artificial intelligence is estimated between 312.5 billion and 764.6 billion liters of water in 2025, according to a journal article.
That’s about as many water bottles consumed around the world in a year.
Hewes remains optimistic that the collaborative could make a significant difference to offset Amazon’s water usage in the basin.
“I think if we can demonstrate what works and what doesn’t and show how technology can play a role and do it at scale and at speed, I think we can make a big impact and help accelerate progress on it,” Hewes said. “But it’s still going to take a whole bunch of folks working together to solve the bigger problem.
According to Amazon, the company has 23 warehouses located within the Colorado River Basin, but does not report on the overall water use.
This week, the company also announced its partnership with the Water Resilience Coalition – a United Nations-backed alliance that works to preserve freshwater resources globally.
