Amazon wants to help the Colorado River, but we still don’t know how much water the company uses

Amazon plans to spend $20 million on water conservation projects along the Colorado River, a crucial but dwindling water supply for 40 million people in the Western US.

The initiative comes as Amazon and other tech companies face mounting scrutiny over how much water their data centers use. Amazon has a goal of becoming water positive — replenishing more water than it uses — by the end of the decade. It recently disclosed some information about its water use, but we still have an incomplete picture of the company’s impact as a whole.

Amazon announced the launch of a Colorado River Basin Collaborative today, with a mission to “create one of the biggest corporate water conservation efforts for a single U.S. watershed.” It expects to raise $100 million over two years — including the $20 million investment from its own coffers — for water conservation efforts.