Garman also said data centers generate billions of dollars in tax revenue, create jobs and support schools, emergency services and other local projects in communities where they operate. AWS CEO Matt Garman recently pushed back against growing criticism of data centers, calling four common claims about their impact “myths. In a long blog post, Matt Garman addressed concerns over water consumption, rising electricity rates, pollution from backup diesel generators and the benefits data centers bring to local communities. He argued that data centers use far less water than often claimed, are not solely responsible for higher power bills and rarely run their backup generators.
Direct data center water consumption is about 0.5% of total U.S. direct industrial water use—orders of magnitude less than golf courses, almond farming, and many other industries. The reality is that a typical data center uses, on average, about 170,000 gallons per day. And at Amazon, our average data center uses less than 13,000 gallons per day (the equivalent of just 42 U.S. households).
This is false. Data centers actually use very little water relative to other industries. For instance, U.S. golf courses alone use ~200x more water than all of Amazon’s data centers—more in about two days than we use in a full year. And, in a recent study of major U.S. One of the most common soundbites repeated about water is that a typical data center uses five million gallons per day. This is also false.
Most of the services consumers, businesses, and governments rely on every day (e.g., 911 calls, stock markets, healthcare and banking apps, ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft, ChatGPT) depend on data centers functioning. Critics then see those permits and say things like “…the generators could emit up to 249.9 tons per year each of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds. They’re idle 99.9% of the time (they run roughly 10 hours per year, mostly for required maintenance testing). And even when backup generators do run, much of the industry now uses Tier 4 emission controls (the cleanest EPA emission standard), so annual NOx emissions from an average data center are the same as a single round trip flight from Seattle to London. For example, in Madison County, Mississippi (population: 116,000), where we have two data center sites under construction, there are over 2,300 people currently employed in construction; and in Newton County, Georgia (population: 125,000), there are over 1,500 people currently employed. For example, for the data centers in Madison County, we will employ over 1,700 people, and in Newton County, we will employ 400 people. And, we have over 20 education and workforce development programs to help ensure these jobs are available to people from the community, and over 10,000 learners and educators are participating in our programs across 15 data center regions.
As a result, data centers have backup power available in case of a power outage. This is also untrue. Some do this through diesel generators that sit idle most of the year. However, when those generators are installed, companies need to get permits for the full potential emissions—what those generators would produce if they ran for the maximum hours under the permit. The truth is data center generators almost never run. Additionally, thousands of construction jobs are created to build data centers. These jobs benefit families in these communities and are a boon for local small businesses. The average wages paid far exceed local and national medians, and the job numbers associated with these projects are typically very significant compared to the size of these communities. Many jobs are also created to operate a data center once it’s complete. You can read more about those and our other education programs here.
Data center operators are often the single largest taxpayer in a community, with upfront payments routinely exceeding entire annual municipal budgets in the first year of construction, and long-term tax revenue often exceeding prior land use revenue by more than 1,000%. Joseph County, Indiana, the taxes Amazon will pay to the county are estimated to exceed $3 billion, while the prior use on the same land would have paid just $1.2 million over the same term. In Montgomery County, Missouri, our project will pay more than $1.8 billion in taxes over 25 years, while the prior use would have generated about $200,000 (0.01% of what we’ll pay in taxes) over the same period. A 2026 report by Mangum Economics for the Northern Virginia Technology Council estimates that without data center revenue, the average homeowner in Loudoun County, Virginia would pay additional property taxes of $5,800 per year. Over the past three years, Amazon has contributed more than $1 billion to communities across the U.S. in which we have a meaningful data center presence.
This is also false. Data centers bring considerable tax revenue, positive economic impact, large numbers of good jobs, education programs and other benefits to the communities where they’re built. For example, in St. This new revenue from data centers often not only dramatically reduces the taxes paid by families, but it also funds investments in schools, fire and police departments, parks, roads, and other community services. This is on top of the direct investments most data center companies make to local organizations that are used to address issues most important to them, such as modernized emergency dispatch services, clean energy projects, and support for local food banks.