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.
