If you hang out in any even vaguely AI-skeptical parts of the Internet, you've probably stumbled on plenty of memes and posts premised on data centers' insatiable thirst for water to power evaporative cooling. But a new report from Amazon highlights just how little water all these AI data centers are using in aggregate, on a relative basis, even as individual data centers can strain local water supplies.

In a Thursday blog post, Amazon claims its data centers withdrew "about 2.5 billion gallons" globally in 2025. That number sounds incredibly large at first glance, but it looks downright puny compared to the 117 trillion gallons of water withdrawn in the US alone in 2015. It's also useful to compare Amazon's number to stats from more water-intensive areas, from the 3.3 trillion gallons used annually on US lawns and landscaping to the 1.3 trillion gallons a year used in California almond orchards to the 531 billion gallons a year used just for US golf courses.

Amazon is just one company, of course, and a relative latecomer to reporting its data center water usage numbers. Google data centers withdrew about more than 6.1 billion gallons of water in 2024, on top of about 2.75 billion gallons from Microsoft and about 1.4 billion gallons from Meta in the same year.

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Google loves telling us all the ways people are using its generative AI products to build new things, grow businesses, and save the world. Supposedly. Of course, people are also using AI for crime. Google has announced a new legal salvo aimed at a Chinese group called Outsider Enterprise, which is allegedly responsible for a massive AI-powered scam campaign. Google says it's working with law enforcement and mobile carriers to fight back.

According to Google's legal filing, Outsider Enterprise operates through Telegram. The group offers phishing-as-a-service to individuals who may not be technically savvy enough to set up fraudulent websites and text campaigns on their own. In its Telegram channels, Outsider Enterprise reportedly provided instructions on how to use Google's Gemini AI to create websites that imitate those of Google, YouTube, and government agencies such as New York’s E-ZPass. The group offered nearly 300 scam templates.

Google says that scams enabled by Outsider Enterprise resulted in more than 2.5 million text messages being sent to Android users. About 55,000 of those messages happened in a two-week period last month. In all, Google has tracked 9,000 fake websites and 1 million URLs connected to the scam network.

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