System boundary

The system boundary defines what activities and related water withdrawals are accounted for in model calculations. The model allocates total water withdrawals from AWS data center operations to individual customer accounts based on their proportional cloud service usage, to ensure customers receive transparent, attributable water withdrawals data. To identify which activities are accounted for in model calculations, we define attributable and non-attributable water withdrawals.

"Attributable water withdrawals" is water withdrawn from any source to directly support the provision of cloud services for AWS customers – for example, water used in data center cooling systems, domestic water uses within operational data centers, and water used to fill a fire flow tank. The model includes water withdrawals from AWS owned, leased, or controlled data center facilities. This includes certain edge sites (e.g., CloudFront, Transit sites, Points of Presence). Primary activity data sources include utility bills for owned and leased facilities, and third-party operator reports for controlled facilities.

Conversely, water withdrawals not directly connected to AWS cloud service delivery are classified as "non-attributable water withdrawals". The model excludes AWS warehouses and manufacturing facilities, AWS office buildings, and Customer-hosted sites (Amazon Cloud Extension sites, Embedded Points of Presence, Outpost locations) as they support general business operations rather than direct cloud service delivery.