AWS Boardman Olson Road data center, Boardman, Oregon

Amazon operates a data center campus on Olson Road in Boardman, Morrow County, in eastern Oregon, over an aquifer that supplies about 45,000 people, most of them through private wells. Amazon arrived in the county in 2008 and opened its first data center there in 2011; the Olson Road campus is operating, and Amazon has since built seven data centers in the county with five more under construction.

Decades of fertilizer and dairy runoff had already pushed nitrate levels in basin wells above safe limits before Amazon arrived, and cooling water that evaporates at its data centers returns to farmland more concentrated, an investigation published November 25, 2025 found. Water entering Amazon's data centers measured 13 parts per million of nitrate; the wastewater leaving averaged 56, against Oregon's limit of 7.

County commissioner Jim Doherty, a cattle rancher, began testing tap water in 2022 and declared an emergency that June after finding widespread illness in homes he visited; voters recalled him and a fellow commissioner that November. Resident Kathy Mendoza's well tested at up to 55.7 parts per million: "How can you live with yourself knowing that the water you put in people's houses is causing miscarriages or cancer?"

Amazon has denied causing the contamination and on March 31, 2026 agreed to pay $20.5 million to settle a federal lawsuit, Pearson v. Port of Morrow, without admitting wrongdoing. The case continues against the Port of Morrow, Lamb Weston and other farms and companies, with plaintiffs seeking class-action status and a state-backed cleanup and health monitoring program.