Where do Amazon’s data centers in Mississippi stand? Company offers details on project status, water and energy footprint

By Alex Rozier | Originally published by Mississippi Today

In the last two years, Amazon has announced four data center facilities in Mississippi, expanding its capacity for cloud computing services through AWS, or Amazon Web Services. 

One of the four, in Canton, is already operating, while the other three – in Ridgeland, Vicksburg and Clinton – are in the works. 

“Amazon currently has five buildings operational at the Canton site, with plans to at least double that presence,” David Ross, a spokesperson for the company, told Mississippi Today in an email. “The Ridgeland site is in the early stages of construction, and a similar footprint is anticipated. Ultimately, each location is driven by campus size and may evolve over time.”

The Clinton and Vicksburg facilities are both in the “site prep” and “pre-construction” phases, Ross said. 

Regarding energy usage, a point of concern for the public regarding data centers, Amazon said it “has worked with Entergy Mississippi to ensure we pay 100% of the costs associated with our new data center campuses, covering all expenses for new energy infrastructure and upgrades that also strengthen overall grid reliability for all customers.”

Overall, the company is planning to invest a total of $25 billion into the state, creating 2,000 jobs. The revenue is allowing Entergy Mississippi, Amazon’s power provider, to invest $300 million to upgrade its power grid over the next five years, both companies have said. The improvements include a goal of reducing Entergy’s power outages by 50%. 

Amazon added that it’s investing in five renewable energy projects in the state, “enabling 616 MWs of new carbon-free energy in Mississippi through solar and wind farms across the state—enough to power 152,000 U.S. homes.” Those include the state’s first utility-scale wind farm, which opened in 2024 in Tunica County. 

The company also addressed its plans for water usage, another concern Mississippians have raised around data centers. For all of its facilities in the region, Amazon said it only plans to use water for cooling during the hottest points of the year, about 9% of the time, using air cooling the rest of the year. 

Amazon also pointed to an initiative it announced last year, in partnership with Arable and Mississippi State University, to replenish the Mississippi River Valley Alluvial Aquifer, which supplies groundwater to the Delta, by making farms’ water usage more efficient.

Canton

While not providing specific amounts, Amazon said its data center in Canton is using water for cooling from Canton Municipal Utilities. Next year, though, the company, in a partnership with Veolia, plans to transition to using recycled wastewater from the Madison County Wastewater Authority for all its cooling needs. 

Chris Low, Veolia’s executive vice president for Water Technologies in North America, told Mississippi Today the recycling process will use a combination of submerged, ultra-filtration membranes and reverse osmosis to “ bring that water up to quality that’s needed for the cooling system.”

Low said Veolia is working with more data centers elsewhere to reduce their water footprint. 

“ Our ability to provide water security and assurances to the local community that the facility won’t impact or have minimal impact on local water resources is really important,” he said.

As far as the standard of water needed for data centers, Low said the water can’t have “organics or different mineral components” that might contaminate the cooling system. He estimated the Canton facility will use about 83 million gallons of recycled wastewater each year. 

After the data center uses the recycled wastewater, Low said the water gets recirculated by the cooling systems six times before it’s put into a storage pond  “at a quality that it could be discharged into the environment.” 

Amazon also said it is investing in upgrades to increase CMU’s water system capacity by 39%, and increasing capacity at Madison County Wastewater Authority’s Beatties Bluff Wastewater Treatment Plant by 50%.

Ridgeland

Amazon said it will exclusively use water from the city of Ridgeland for its data center there, adding up to about 93 million gallons each year. The company said it’s investing $37 million into the city’s water system, increasing the system’s capacity by 10%. 

Vicksburg

Amazon will use water from the city of Vicksburg for its facility there, the company said, and is requesting 25 million gallons per year. That usage, the company said, comes out to less than the equivalent of about 200 single-family homes. 

Clinton

Amazon’s planned facility in Clinton will have a minimal water footprint because it will be air-cooled, the company said. While using water for cooling is still the industry standard, Amazon said it didn’t make as much sense for this facility.

“This facility is a retrofitted building, and the cooling system design is driven by the existing structure,” the company wrote.  “Adapting the building for the standard water-cooled approach would have required significant structural modifications, making air-cooled chillers the right fit for this site’s constraints and timeline.”

This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Source: Original Article