Matt Damon is starring in one of the most epic films of the summer — Christopher Nolan’s big budget screen adaptation of the literary epic The Odyssey.
And Damon is capitalizing on all of the hype that surrounds a blockbuster to talk about a longtime passion of his – water.
But the choice of corporate partnerships his charity has linked up with for a new initiative are well known for the amount of water resources they drain.
The 55-year-old Academy Award winner is the co-founder of Water.org, a non-profit organization that helps improve access to safe water and sanitation.
In the lead-up to The Odyssey’s Friday release, Damon was promoting — and even rapping about — a fundraising campaign and product partnership, called Get Blue, with companies that include Starbucks, Gap and Amazon.
All of these companies have had controversies related to water and other issues, says Alison Kemper, an associate professor of entrepreneurship and strategy at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Toronto Metropolitan University.
But Amazon, in particular, uses billions of litres of water to cool its data centres. That’s enough to, in theory, meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of people annually in some of the very places Damon’s Water.org works.
So partnering with a water organization, at a time when there’s a great deal of public scrutiny on how much water is used to cool data centres, is “a way of managing the public relations risks,” Kemper said.
Hamilton council voted Wednesday on whether it should pause the development of new data centres. Shion Guha, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, says the vote highlights the growing tension between the government’s technology promises and how communities feel about it.
Damon’s big issue
Damon co-founded Water.org along with CEO Gary White in 2009 and since that time the charity says it has, to date, changed the lives of 92 million people by, in large part, providing microcredit loans to connect homes in developing countries to reliable water resources.
“I couldn’t believe how big this issue was and how no one was talking about it,” Damon said of his commitment to the cause in an interview with Men’s Journal last month, while promoting The Odyssey and the launch of the Get Blue initiative.
Get Blue, Damon explained in the interview and others since, is an awareness and fundraising campaign that has its corporate partners donating a small amount of money for each purchase of limited edition Get Blue products.
Gap, for example, has a Get Blue capsule collection and will share $5 US for each hoodie or hat someone buys; Starbuck promised to share $0.25 from special blue beverages sold between June 16 to July 7.
Amazon is selling products related to the campaign as well, but has also set up a feature that allows you to ask Alexa — its virtual assistant — to donate $5 on “your behalf,” which Amazon says comes at no cost to consumers (but is capped at 100,000 donations and only in the U.S.). It also says it will donate $1 any time you stream its Get Blue playlist.
A spokesperson for Damon said he wasn’t immediately available to comment on the choice of corporate partnerships for the Get Blue campaign.
But Water.org, in an email to CBC News, said “companies that use a lot of water also have real resources to help solve the water crisis.”
The organization didn’t divulge how much money had been raised for the Get Blue campaign so far. But a spokesperson says that, as a longtime partner, Amazon has helped “change the lives of 1.25 million people with access to safe water or sanitation” through Water.org’s microfinancing.
On its website, the charity says that $5 helps one person and $25 helps a family “get lasting access to safe water or sanitation.”
“For those [92] million families that could get the loan and build the pipes and get the water into their homes, that’s good,” Kemper said.
But she says Water.org’s microfinance endeavours are rooted in a more capitalistic model, compared with other non-profits working in the field of water access, and that makes it “an easier one to deal with” for corporations such as Amazon.
The movie will be screened in the 70 mm Imax format in 26 theatres worldwide, including the Kramer Imax theatre in Regina’s science centre.
How much water flows into Amazon?
Seattle-based Amazon has not disclosed how many data centres it operates, but the investigative website SourceMaterial reported last year that it has more than 900 data centres globally.
Amazon stated last month, however, that it used nearly 9.5 billion litres of water to cool data centres in 2025, saying that volume was down two per cent from the previous year. The company says it’s striving to become more water efficient by increasing reliance on recycled water and making engineering changes in its facilities to reduce consumption.
SourceMaterial also revealed, in a separate article published in April 2025, that Amazon and fellow tech giants Microsoft and Google were building data centres in water-scarce areas around the world.
It’s not just the cooling of the data centres that can be a drain on water sources but the entire chain, explains Kaveh Madani, director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health based in Toronto.
He says everything from the mining of critical minerals — particularly in developing countries where access to safe water can be scarce — to the manufacturing of semi-conductors used to power the technology has a water footprint.
But he cautions against some of the fear around data centres, including those used to power AI technology, saying “nothing is absolutely bad or absolutely good” and that there has to be a balance between the cost and the benefits.
He says there is a concern about how much water is used to power things such as cloud services and generative AI at a time when many places in the world are “water bankrupt.”
But Madani says water problems around the globe are “diverse,” and he cautions against trying to directly link increased data centre operations to all of the worlds water woes.
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Purchase power
Kemper says campaigns like Water.org’s Get Blue initiative can be a win for corporations and the organizations that get the additional funding they bring in.
But it can also be a means of “greasing the wheels” for consumers who want to feel good about the companies they buy from, even when they know there’s a downside.
“One just has to be aware of why they’re doing it and the role of your own consumption in determining corporate activity,” she said.
Madani says there’s actually a different role consumers can play, one that doesn’t involve buying merchandise from a celebrity-led corporate social responsibility campaign.
If you have concerns about reducing water use for data centres, he says rethinking your own use of technology can go a long way — especially with water- and energy-intensive tools such as generative AI.
While he says the least water-intensive use of AI is “no use,” he doesn’t think that means we actually have to stop using it altogether.
“It means that we have to use it more responsibly, when it’s necessary [and] when there is value added,” he said.
The AI data centre boom is coming to Canada and cooling the technology will require massive amounts of clean water. For The National, CBC’s Jonathan Montpetit dives into the consumption and uncovers a murky business with little oversight.
