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 “Wa

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