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Sustainability
Sustainability

AWS Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offering, with millions of global users depending on it every day. To build a sustainable business for our customers and for the world we all share, we’re designing data centers that provide the efficient, resilient service our customers expect while minimizing our environmental footprint—and theirs.

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Progress

4.1x AWS infrastructure is up to 4.1 times more energy efficient than on-premises and can reduce workloads’ carbon footprint by up to 99%

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8B+ liters of water expected to be returned each year to local communities through Amazon’s water replenishment efforts

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100% of electricity consumed by Amazon was matched with renewable energy sources in 2023

Our approach

Our sustainability work includes enhancing energy efficiency, transitioning to carbon-free energy, reducing embodied carbon, using water responsibly, driving a circular economy, and enabling sustainability for customers.

Increasing efficiency

We focus on efficiency across all aspects of our infrastructure, from the design of our data centers and hardware, to modeling the performance of our operations for continually enhanced efficiency. By working to improve efficiency, AWS can optimize the energy and water needed to power its data centers.
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Power usage effectiveness and water usage effectiveness

AWS continually innovates its data center designs to increase efficiency. New data center components are projected to reduce mechanical energy consumption by up to 46% and reduce embodied carbon in the concrete used by 35%. As AWS builds new data centers, it seeks the optimal balance of energy and water use. AWS measures the efficiency of its data center operations through power usage effectiveness (PUE) and water usage effectiveness (WUE) metrics.

Power usage effectiveness

PUE is a measure of data center efficiency. A lower PUE indicates a more efficient data center and a PUE score of 1.0 is perfect. AWS calculates PUE using the internationally-recognized principles of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in line with our PUE Methodology.

In 2024, AWS data centers reported a global PUE of 1.15, and our best performing site was in Europe with a PUE of 1.04. In the Americas, our best performing site had a PUE of 1.05, and in Asia Pacific it was 1.07. These ratings are better than both the public cloud industry average of 1.25 and 1.63 for on-premises enterprise data centers, as estimated by the International Data Corporation.+

 

+IDC, 2H Datacenter Trends: Sustainable Datacenter Builds and CO2 Emissions. Doc # US51911924, January 2025’

Water usage effectiveness

WUE is a data center efficiency metric that measures the volume of water withdrawn per kWh of IT load within a data center. AWS works to minimize water use by using real-time data to identify leaks, leveraging on-site treatment technologies, fine-tuning mechanical cooling operational settings, and utilizing thousands of sensors to detect anomalies to alert operators of inefficiencies. 

Global infrastructure teams deploy cloud-based technology in AWS data centers to determine and track efforts to maintain or improve WUE. These efforts have helped AWS achieve a global data center WUE of 0.15 liters of water withdrawn per kilowatt-hour of IT Load (L/kWh) in 2024, a 17% improvement from 2023 and a 40% improvement since 2021.

See available regions PUE and WUE

The following data includes average PUE and WUE ratings for data center regions designed and operated by AWS between January 1 and December 31 of each year. Data is not available (—) where AWS operated data centers less than 12 months.

 

 

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AWS Geography PUE and AWS Region PUE

While year-over-year reported PUE has improved or remained stable in the vast majority of our Regions, a few Regions saw slightly higher PUE values in certain years. The primary reasons for this include different weather patterns that require different amounts of cooling, and the launch of new, not-yet fully loaded data centers within a Region. These result in higher average PUEs for the specific Region while data center utilization increases.

 

AWS Geography PUE and WUE

Geography PUE 2022 PUE 2023 PUE 2024 WUE 2024
Global 1.15 1.15 1.15 0.15
Europe 1.11 1.11 1.11 0.04
Midde East 1.38 1.33 1.31 N/A
Africa 1.36 1.24 1.24 N/A
North America 1.14 1.14 1.14 0.13
Central/South America N/A 1.18 1.17 0.23
Asia Pacific (excl. China) 1.26 1.28 1.27 0.98
China 1.28 1.26 1.25 N/A

AWS Region PUE and WUE

AWS Region PUE 2022 PUE 2023 PUE 2024 WUE 2024

Europe (Stockholm)

1.12

1.12

1.10

0.02
Middle East (Bahrain) 1.38 1.32 1.33 N/A
Asia-Pacific (Mumbai) 1.43 1.44 1.42 N/A
Asia-Pacific (Jakarta) 1.39 1.35 1.40 2.75
U.S. East (Ohio) 1.12 1.12 1.13 0.10
Africa (Cape Town) 1.36 1.24 1.24 N/A
Europe (Ireland) 1.10 1.10 1.11 0.03
Middle East (UAE) -- 1.36 1.27 N/A
Europe (Frankfurt) 1.32 1.33 1.35 0.01
South America (Sao Paulo) -- 1.18 1.17 0.23
Asia-Pacific (Hyderabad) -- 1.50 1.46 N/A
U.S. East (Northern Virginia) 1.16 1.15 1.15 0.12
Asia-Pacific (Melbourne) -- 1.08 1.07 0.02
Asia-Pacific (Tokyo) 1.30 1.32 1.27 0.91
U.S. West (Oregon) 1.13 1.13 1.12 0.16
U.S. West (Northern California) 1.17 1.17 1.18 0.51
Asia-Pacific (Singapore) 1.33 1.30 1.32 1.68
Asia-Pacific (Sydney) 1.15 1.15 1.16 0.12
Canada (Central) 1.26 1.22 1.19 0.04
Europe (Spain) -- 1.11 1.09 0.24
China (Ningxia) 1.28 1.26 1.25 N/A
Canada (West) -- -- 1.17 0.08

*As our Jakarta data center capacity increases and our water treatment solutions are introduced in 2025, we expect WUE to reach our target design value. It is not possible for AWS to use our Direct Evaporative design in the Jakarta region, but AWS does have plans to deliver recycled water for cooling in the region while pursuing this WUE target.

Efficiency of scale

Our scale allows us to achieve higher resource utilization and energy efficiency than the typical on-premises data center. A study released by Accenture and AWS estimates running optimized workloads on AWS’s infrastructure is up to 4.1 times more efficient than on-premises and can reduce workloads’ carbon footprint by up to 99%.
Download How Moving onto The AWS Cloud Reduces Carbon Emissions

Predicting performance

We use advanced modeling methods, such as computational fluid dynamics tools, to optimize our data center design. This allows us to understand how a data center will perform before it’s built, enabling us to optimize for higher reliability and energy efficiency in our systems. Once our data centers are operational, real-time, physics-based models allow us to further improve and optimize our designs. We build these custom models using AWS services and weather datasets from the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative to predict system performance for our sites and track their performance against how they should be operating.

Cooling efficiency

Cooling is one of the largest sources of energy usage in our data centers and we’re continually innovating in cooling efficiency. We use different cooling techniques depending on the time of year and use real-time sensor data to adapt to changing weather conditions. We’re also working to optimize the longevity and airflow performance of the cooling equipment used in our data center cooling systems.

Power efficiency

One of the most visible ways we’re using innovation to improve power efficiency is our investment in AWS chips.

Power efficiency

One of the most visible ways we’re using innovation to improve power efficiency is our investment in AWS chips.

Graviton4

This is the latest generation of chips designed by AWS and the most powerful and energy-efficient chip AWS has built as of 2023. Graviton4 provides up to 30% better computing performance, 50% more cores, and 75% more memory bandwidth than Graviton3 processors while using the same amount of energy.

Inferentia2

In 2023, AWS launched Inferentia2, the second generation of its Inferentia chip, developed to deliver the highest performance at the lowest cost per watt. Inferentia2 is up to 50% more energy-efficient and can reduce costs by up to 40% against comparable Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instances.

See how Amazon Web Services is enabling sustainability solutions.

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Carbon-free energy

We're proud that in 2023, we've achieved our goal to match 100% of the electricity consumed across our operations with renewable energy—a commitment we've met seven years ahead of our original 2030 goal.
Explore carbon-free energy Explore carbon-free energy
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We procure renewable power from utility-scale wind and solar projects that add new sources of carbon-free energy to the grid. These new renewable energy projects support hundreds of jobs while providing hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in local communities. We may support these grids through the purchase of environmental attributes, like Renewable Energy Certificates and Guarantees of Origin, in line with our Renewable Energy Methodology.

 

Amazon’s energy supply from utilities, combined with the renewable energy we procure across the U.S., means that 100% of the electricity consumed by 22 AWS data center regions is matched by renewable energy sources.

Reducing embodied carbon

We’re focused on reducing the indirect emissions associated with building AWS data centers and the manufacturing of our hardware.

Lower-carbon concrete and steel

We’re working to reduce the embodied carbon of materials like concrete and steel, which are used to build our data centers. Embodied carbon is emitted during the extraction, manufacturing, and transportation of materials to construction sites. In 2023, AWS built 36 data centers with lower-carbon concrete and 31 data centers with lower-carbon steel.
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AWS hardware

We’re also focused on reducing embodied emissions associated with the manufacturing of AWS hardware, including silicon-based devices like processors and solid-state drives. As these emissions are primarily from material extraction and product manufacturing, the path to decarbonizing chip production involves all parts of the lifecycle. To address this, we’re working with suppliers to improve their energy efficiency.
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More sustainable fuels

In 2023, AWS started transitioning to hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) to power backup generators at its data center sites in Europe and the U.S., with sites in Ireland, Sweden, and Oregon among the first to make the switch. HVO is a type of renewable diesel made from waste cooking oil or vegetable, plant, and residue oils. HVO can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 90% over the fuel’s lifecycle when compared with fossil fuel-based diesel.
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Prioritizing a circular economy

AWS embraces circular economy principles for its server racks by designing reusable and lower-carbon rack systems from the outset. In addition, AWS works to keep equipment operating efficiently and to recover value from securely decommissioned equipment through reuse, repair, and recycling. By working to maximize resource value for as long as possible, AWS reduces waste generation from its global operations, decreases the use of raw materials, and reduces carbon emissions across its supply chain. As a result, in 2023, 14.6 million hardware components were diverted from landfills by being recycled or sold into the secondary market for reuse.

Design better

We concentrate on avoiding excess material such as steel or plastic, increasing recycled and bio-based content, and planning for repair, reuse, and recycling from the beginning.        

Operate longer

When AWS uses equipment for as long as operationally efficient, it reduces the carbon footprint associated with manufacturing and using new hardware and avoids unnecessary waste.

Recover more

AWS sends retired infrastructure hardware from around the world to its regional reverse logistics hubs. These hubs help AWS consolidate, assess, repair, and recirculate functional equipment back into its inventory or to third parties to be sold for reuse.

Committed to being water positive

At Amazon, we know that water is a precious resource. AWS is committed to being water positive by 2030 and making more water available to the communities where we operate.
Explore water stewardship

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