The cloud
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.
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 continually improving our efficiency, we can reduce the amount of energy needed to operate our data centers.
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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%.
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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.
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Power efficiency
One of the most visible ways we’re using innovation to improve power efficiency is our investment in AWS chips.
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.
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Reducing embodied carbon
We’re focused on reducing the indirect emissions associated with building AWS data centers and the manufacturing of our hardware.