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.

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Our Progress

By the Numbers

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%

7 Billion+

Liters of water will be returned each year to local communities through AWS’s water replenishment efforts

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 renewable 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 continuous enhanced efficiency. By continuously improving our efficiency, we can reduce the amount of energy needed to operate our data centers.

Efficiency of Scale

Our scale allows us to achieve higher resource utilization and energy efficiency than the typical on-premises data center. A new report, Moving Onto the AWS Cloud Reduces Carbon Emissions, estimates AWS’s infrastructure is up to 4.1 times more efficient than on-premises, and when workloads are optimized on AWS, the associated carbon footprint can be reduced by up to 99%. On-premises refers to organizations running hardware and software within their own physical space.

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 is ever 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.

industrial water cooling pipes in shades of blue and red.

Cooling Efficiency

Cooling is one of the largest sources of energy usage in our data centers and we’re continuously innovating in cooling efficiency. We use different cooling techniques depending on the time of year, and we utilize real-time sensor data to adapt to changing weather conditions. We are 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 are using innovation to improve power efficiency is our investment in AWS chips. AWS Graviton4 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. 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.

Renewable Energy

In 2019, we set an ambitious goal to match 100% of the electricity we consume with renewable energy by 2030. This goal includes all data centers, logistics facilities, physical stores, and corporate offices, as well as on-site charging points and our financially integrated subsidiaries. We are proud to have achieved this goal in 2023, seven years early, with 100% of the electricity consumed by Amazon matched with renewable energy sources, up from 90% in 2022.

Explore our global projects using the map below.

Renewable Energy

Types of projects

Wind Farms

Solar Farms

We contract for renewable power from utility-scale projects that add renewable energy to the grid. In some markets, we support the development of a carbon-free grid through the purchase of environmental attributes, such as Renewable Energy Certificates and Guarantees of Origin, in line with our Renewable Energy Methodology.

For select regions where renewable energy could not be procured or matched locally, AWS procures renewable energy attributes in other locations. In 2023, the electricity consumed in the following 22 AWS Regions was matched by 100% renewable energy procured in market:

U.S. East (Northern Virginia)
GovCloud (U.S. East)
U.S. East (Ohio)
U.S. West (Oregon)
GovCloud (U.S. West)
U.S. West (Northern California)
Canada (Central)
Canada (West)
Europe (Ireland)
Europe (Frankfurt)
Europe (London)
Europe (Milan)
Europe (Paris)
Europe (Stockholm)
Europe (Spain)
Europe (Zurich)
Asia-Pacific (Mumbai)
Asia-Pacific (Hyderabad)
Asia-Pacific (Osaka)
Asia-Pacific (Tokyo)
China (Beijing)
China (Ningxia)

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 & Steel

AWS Hardware

More-Sustainable Fuels

Lower Carbon Concrete & 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.

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 are working with suppliers to improve their energy efficiency.

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.

Keeping Technologies in Use Longer

AWS is reducing emissions related to server use and networking equipment by increasing server lifespan.

This includes refining software to run more efficiently, which lowers stress on hardware and extends the amount of time it can be used. In February 2024, AWS announced that the average expected life of its servers had improved from five to six years. To support these efforts, AWS has a robust maintenance and repair program in place that is designed to increase component reuse and further reduce carbon emissions and waste across its supply chain.

A masked person in safety vest holding laptop stands in front of computer equipment

To help prevent our equipment from ending up in landfills and avoid associated emissions, we are investing in responsible end of life management systems. We use reverse logistics hubs to evaluate and reuse electronic equipment in our global data center fleet. These hubs help us consolidate, assess, and recirculate functional equipment back into our inventory. When we no longer have use for equipment, we remove all customer data and sell the equipment on the secondary market for reuse or work with a network of experienced vendors to recycle parts.

Spotlight

AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool

As we continue to invest in sustainability across our infrastructure, many of our customers have asked us to help measure the carbon footprint of their AWS workloads—both to understand how moving to AWS reduces their carbon footprint and to report their overall footprint.

Our customer carbon footprint tool uses simple visualizations to show customers their historical carbon emissions, estimate emissions avoided by using AWS instead of an on-premises data center, and review forecasted emissions based on their current use.

A person types on a laptop with an AWS sticker.

On Amazon Web Services

Customer Carbon Footprint Tool

Committed to Water Positive by 2030

At AWS, we know that water is a precious resource and we’re committed to being water positive by 2030. That means we’ll return more water to communities and the environment than we use in our data center operations.

July 13, 2022

Water Stewardship

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