Hidden underground around the world lie 110 quadrillion kilometers of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks—webs of ultra-thin threads that, if connected in a single line, would stretch almost a billion times the distance between the Earth and the sun, according to new research published in Science on Thursday.

These fungal communities form intimate relationships with the roots of plants, which they provide with nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for carbon, 1 billion tons of which the networks sequester underground annually, previous research has found. If the fungal network wasn’t storing it, that carbon would be warming the atmosphere.

In a Thursday blog post, Amazon claims its data centers withdrew “about 2.5 billion gallons” globally in 2025. That number sounds incredibly large at first glance, but it looks downright puny compared to the 117 trillion gallons of water withdrawn in the US alone in 2015. It’s also useful to compare Amazon’s number to stats from more water-intensive areas, from the 3.3 trillion gallons used annually on US lawns and landscaping to the 1.3 trillion gallons a year used in California almond orchards to the 531 billion gallons a year used just for US golf courses.

Amazon is just one company, of course, and a relative latecomer to reporting its data center water usage numbers. Google data centers withdrew about more than 6.1 billion gallons of water in 2024, on top of about 2.75 billion gallons from Microsoft and about 1.4 billion gallons from Meta in the same year.