As Big Tech heads into the heart of its 2026 proxy season, an unusual coalition of investors, state regulators, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers is converging on the same question: how much water and electricity are America’s largest data centers actually consuming, and who is paying for the build-out?
The numbers that are public are startling. Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy told investors in February that the company added 3.9 gigawatts of compute capacity in 2025 alone — roughly the output of three large nuclear reactors — and plans to spend $200 billion on infrastructure in 2026, almost entirely to fuel artificial intelligence. Alphabet has admitted that its emissions, which it pledged in 2020 to halve by 2030, instead rose 51 percent by the end of 2024 against its 2019 baseline. North American data centers consumed nearly one trillion liters of water last year, according to market research firm Mordor Intelligence cited in the same disclosures.
What is not public is the granular site-level data investors say they need to assess risk — and that local communities and ratepayers say they need to understand who is on the hook for new transmission lines, water mains, and natural-gas peaker plants. The boards of all three U.S. hyperscalers — Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft — are urging shareholders to vote against expanded disclosure proposals filed for this year’s annual meetings. The Amazon vote is scheduled for May 20; Alphabet’s for June 5; Microsoft’s fiscal-year 2026 proxy season is already underway.
What Shareholders Are Asking For
The Amazon proposal, Item 6 on the company’s 2026 ballot, was filed by Brian Kariger and represented by the nonprofit As You Sow, joined by Mercy Investment Services — the investment arm of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas. It asks Amazon’s board to publish a report by March 31, 2027 detailing the incremental capital and operating costs incurred to implement Amazon’s “Climate Pledge” since fiscal 2019, and the board’s reassessment of that pledge in light of the AI build-out. Amazon’s 2026 proxy statement recommends a vote against, calling the requested report “impractical” and “not meaningful to shareholders.”
A separate exempt solicitation filed by the National Legal and Policy Center — a center-right corporate-governance group — argues the opposite: that a company that spent $131.8 billion on capital expenditures in 2025 and plans to spend $200 billion in 2026 “does not lack the data or the capacity to produce this report. It lacks the will.” The NLPC filing notes that Amazon’s cash capital expenditures stood at just $12.7 billion when it co-founded the Climate Pledge in 2019. The company has since become the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy, but its 2025 revenue of $716.9 billion is generated by a fundamentally different business than the one that made the original commitment.
At Alphabet, Boston-based Trillium Asset Management filed a resolution last December — Proposal 5 on the June 5 ballot — asking the company to publish a detailed pathway for meeting its 2030 emissions-reduction targets, including contingencies for AI- and data-center-driven load growth. Trillium cited Alphabet’s own admission that emissions have risen 51 percent rather than fallen. Alphabet’s board recommends a vote against.
Microsoft’s fiscal-year 2026 proxy includes six shareholder proposals, several of which touch on AI governance, data-center disclosure, and lobbying transparency. The Microsoft board recommends voting against all six.
The 2026 proxy environment is otherwise inhospitable to such measures. According to Ballotpedia, ESG-related shareholder proposals are down 47 percent year-over-year, and the Capital Research Center’s 2026 Proxy Preview reports the smallest number of environmental and social resolutions since 2018. That makes the persistence of the data-center disclosure proposals — and the breadth of the coalition behind them, which spans progressive Catholic investors and conservative governance groups — notable.
What the Filings Don’t Say
The disclosure gap the proposals aim at is well-documented. A peer-reviewed analysis published last September in research syndicated through The Conversation compared the 2025 sustainability reports of the four largest hyperscalers and found a uniform pattern of partial disclosure:
- Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud-infrastructure provider, reports total company water usage but does not break it down by data center, region, or watershed.
- Microsoft reports aggregate corporate water demand but does not separate data-center consumption from its other operations.
- Google reports site-level water data for facilities it owns or directly leases, but excludes third-party-operated colocation sites that increasingly carry its workload.
- Meta reports aggregate water use at the data-center level but, like the others, does not disclose the indirect water embedded in the electricity its facilities purchase.
That indirect footprint matters. A 2024 study from the University of California catalogued in the same review found that data centers consumed roughly 800 billion liters of water indirectly worldwide — water evaporated at the thermal power plants generating their electricity. A separate 2025 ACM study cited in the same coverage concluded that “the vast majority of water consumption happens offsite” of an AI facility. None of the four hyperscalers disclose this layer of consumption in any granular form.
Amazon spokesperson Josh Weissman, the company’s director of infrastructure capacity delivery, told Reuters earlier this month that the firm is “increasingly disclosing site-specific water consumption data where we operate.” A Microsoft spokesperson said environmental sustainability is “a core value.” Google declined to comment when contacted by Reuters; Meta did not respond.
State enforcement officials are no longer waiting. In September 2025, Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, joined by 15 state attorneys general, opened a formal investigation into whether the renewable-energy claims of major tech companies — including Amazon’s “100% renewable” branding — accurately reflect how electricity is sourced and where emissions are generated. The investigation is ongoing, and Amazon has not been charged with any violation.
Who Pays for What Big Tech Won’t Disclose
While shareholders push for site-level numbers, state regulators are already absorbing the consequences of the gap. In November 2025, the Virginia State Corporation Commission — which oversees Dominion Energy, the utility serving Northern Virginia’s “Data Center Alley” — approved a Dominion rate case that will add roughly $16 a month to the typical residential electric bill while creating a new GS-5 rate class for data-center customers, effective January 1, 2027.
The new class applies to customers with 25 megawatts of demand and a load factor of 75 percent or higher, which captures essentially every modern hyperscale facility. GS-5 customers will sign 14-year contracts with demand charges covering at least 85 percent of transmission and distribution costs and 60 percent of generation costs attributable to their service. They will also post upfront collateral and pay exit fees if they leave Dominion’s grid before the contract term ends.
Even with the new structure, the Piedmont Environmental Council’s filings in the docket calculated that 61 percent of the cost of grid upgrades driven by data-center growth will still fall on residential and small-commercial customers after the 14-year period ends. “Residential customers should not be subsidizing these wealthy companies,” the group’s president, Chris Miller, told Inside Climate News. Aaron Ruby, a Dominion spokesperson, framed the same outcome as a win, saying the new class would “ensure that data centers continue paying their fair share of power costs.”
The scale of the underlying load is unprecedented. The Virginia SCC’s order acknowledged that “the size of individual large-load customers, their number, and the speed with which they are seeking to connect to the system, jointly present challenges for [Dominion], existing customers, and the grid at large not seen in decades, if ever.” A typical Dominion data-center customer has grown from 13 megawatts in 2013 — the rough equivalent of 3,250 homes — to a current average of roughly 300 megawatts, with some campuses requesting 7,000 megawatts.
Water tells a similar story. Loudoun County’s potable-water consumption attributable to data centers has risen 250 percent in four years, reaching 899 million gallons in 2023, according to county utility filings. Northern Virginia data centers collectively used roughly two billion gallons that year, a 63-percent increase since 2019. Local utilities have begun warning that further growth will require new reservoirs and treatment capacity that residential customers will be asked to fund through rate cases of their own.
In Iowa, a single hyperscale campus reportedly consumed enough water in 2024 to supply the state’s residential users for five days, according to research by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee published last fall. Neither Iowa nor Virginia currently requires data-center operators to disclose site-level water draws on a public-facing basis.
Federal Disclosure Catches Up
Federal data is also limited. The U.S. Department of Energy reported in December 2024 that data-center electricity demand had tripled over the previous decade and could double or triple again by 2028. A July 2025 DOE grid-reliability assessment warned that combined retirements and projected load growth could increase the risk of outages 100-fold by 2030, with roughly 50 gigawatts of new peak supply needed nationally just to serve data centers.
On January 8, 2026, Representatives Rob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Greg Casar (D-Texas) introduced H.R. 6984, the Data Center Transparency Act. The bill would require the Environmental Protection Agency to submit quarterly reports to Congress on data-center water and energy use, water reuse, pollution discharge, and impacts on local water supplies. It would also direct the Energy Information Administration to collect total energy consumption every six months from each data center in the United States. The bill has been referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and has not yet received a hearing.
The bill is one of more than 15 data-center measures introduced in Virginia alone during the 2026 session, ranging from cost-shifting transmission charges to operators to limits on diesel-generator runtime. Few have passed. Industry lobbying — coordinated through trade groups like the Data Center Coalition — has scaled with the build-out itself.
What to Watch
The May 20 Amazon vote, the June 5 Alphabet vote, and the rolling Microsoft votes will not, on their own, force disclosure. Shareholder proposals are advisory; even when they pass, boards retain discretion. None of the three boards has indicated openness to the requested reports.
What the proposals will produce is a public roll call. Institutional investors who hold the largest hyperscaler positions — BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, and the major public pension funds — will have to register a vote, and proxy-advisory firms ISS and Glass Lewis will publish recommendations that influence those votes. The 2025 proxy season already showed that data-center-related resolutions at Amazon drew higher support than most environmental measures, and the same coalition has expanded for 2026.
The federal Data Center Transparency Act faces longer odds in a divided House Energy and Commerce Committee. State regulators in Virginia, Ohio, Texas, Georgia, and Oregon — all major data-center markets — are moving faster than Congress. Ohio’s adoption of GS-5-style cost allocation in late 2025 reportedly cut pending data-center capacity requests from 30 gigawatts to 13 gigawatts, suggesting that some announced builds were always speculative. Whether that pattern repeats in Virginia, where data-center forecasts increasingly drive the case for new natural-gas plants and continued operation of coal facilities, will become clearer once the GS-5 class takes effect in January 2027.
What remains opaque, for now, is the underlying number every part of this debate turns on: how much water and how much power, at which sites, in which watersheds, on whose grid, the world’s three largest cloud companies are actually using. Until shareholders, regulators, or Congress force the disclosure, the public is being asked to take Big Tech’s word for it — and, in Virginia, to pay an extra $16 a month for the privilege.