more than a dozen shareholders ask for transparency ahead of annual investor meetings

More than a dozen shareholders are filing resolutions ahead of this spring’s annual meetings.

More than a dozen investors are pressuring Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet’s Google to provide detailed data on water and energy consumption at their U.S. data centers, Reuters reported today. The pressure comes as all three companies have recently scrapped multibillion-dollar data center projects following community opposition, and as North American data centers consumed nearly 1 trillion liters of water in 2025, according to market research firm Mordor Intelligence.

Trillium Asset Management, a Boston-based firm that invests partly based on a company’s environmental standards, filed a resolution with Alphabet in December seeking to understand how the company planned to meet climate goals it set in 2020, Andrea Ranger, director of shareholder advocacy at Trillium, told Reuters. Alphabet pledged six years ago to halve its emissions and shift to carbon-free energy sources by 2030, but Trillium said emissions instead rose 51%.

Water usage is still a key concern for AI data centers. Some estimates say that generating just 100 words with OpenAI’s GPT-4 consumes three bottles of water. Last year, another study suggested that AI data centers use more water annually than people drink bottled water, globally.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/investors-push-amazon-microsoft-and-google-to-disclose-data-center-water-and-power-consumption