Microsoft announced a basin-level water disclosure framework in January 2026, committing to replenish more water than it withdraws in the same catchments.1 The same company's development agreement with the city of Racine, Wisconsin included a non-disclosure clause covering community-impact data for its Mount Pleasant campus, an arrangement only broken when Milwaukee Riverkeeper sued for the records. The released figure was 8 million gallons per year for phase 1 of a $3.3 billion site. Amazon still publishes no electricity figures at all.
Milwaukee Riverkeeper is a non-profit water-quality organisation founded in 1995 to monitor and litigate on the Milwaukee River basin, working under the federal Clean Water Act and Wisconsin's open-records law. Its Racine lawsuit invoked the Wisconsin Public Records Law, which generally requires municipal contracts to be disclosed unless a specific statutory exemption applies. The court found the NDA could not override the statutory disclosure obligation. The Mount Pleasant site is the Wisconsin campus on which Microsoft is investing $3.3 billion across multiple build phases, sited in part because the area was previously zoned for the Foxconn project that collapsed in 2018.
The 8 million gallons per year figure is for phase 1 only and excludes evaporative cooling losses, which water disclosure frameworks typically itemise separately. Phase 1 is roughly a quarter of the planned campus by floor area; the full build's annual draw will likely be four to six times the disclosed phase 1 number, depending on cooling architecture. WRI Aqueduct, the World Resources Institute's water-stress mapping tool, classifies the relevant catchment as low-stress, which is part of why the project cleared its environmental review without significant friction.
Microsoft's basin-level framework was designed to be cited in ESG filings; the Racine NDA was designed to keep specific community-impact data out of public hearings. Both can be true simultaneously. Amazon's silence on electricity figures sits at the cleaner end of the same problem. Without site-level disclosure mandated by law (rather than by litigation), corporate sustainability reports remain selective by construction. Whether Microsoft amends its development-agreement template after the Racine ruling is the next test of whether the January pledge is operative or rhetorical.
