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

AWS infrastructure is up to 5 times more energy efficient than typical European data centers

3.9 Billion

Liters of water are returned to communities each year from replenishment projects completed or underway

90%

In 2022, 90% of the electricity consumed by Amazon was attributable to renewable energy sources

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. Multiple studies conducted by 451 Research found that moving on-premises workloads to AWS can lower customers’ workload carbon footprints by nearly 80% and up to 96% once AWS is powered with 100% renewable energy. Our infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median of surveyed U.S. enterprise data centers and up to 5 times more energy efficient than the average European enterprise data center. Download The Carbon Reduction Opportunity of Moving to AWS by 451 Research.

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. Our third generation Arm-based processor AWS Graviton3 is more energy efficient than ever before. Graviton3-based Elastic Cloud Compute instances use up to 60% less energy than comparable Amazon EC2 instances for the same performance. Inferentia is our most power-efficient machine learning inference chip. Our Inferentia2 machine learning chip is up to 50% more performance per watt and can reduce costs by up to 50% against comparable instances.

We are determined to be inventive and relentless, as we work to make the cloud the cleanest and the most energy-efficient way to run all of your infrastructure and your business.

Adam Selipsky

CEO, AWS

Renewable Energy

We’re on a path to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, as part of our commitment to reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. In 2022, 90% of the electricity consumed by Amazon was attributable to renewable energy sources. Our renewable energy investments help power our data centers around the world.

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 wind and solar projects that add clean 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 also may choose to support these grids through the purchase of environmental attributes, like Renewable Energy Certificates and Guarantees of Origin, in line with our Renewable Energy Methodology.

In 2022, the electricity consumed in the following 19 AWS Regions was attributable to 100% renewable energy:

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)
Europe (Ireland)
Europe (Frankfurt)
Europe (London)
Europe (Milan)
Europe (Paris)
Europe (Stockholm)
Europe (Spain)
Europe (Zurich)
Asia-Pacific (Mumbai)
Asia-Pacific (Hyderabad)
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. Globally in 2022, we completed the construction of 16 data centers using lower-carbon concrete and 10 data centers using lower-carbon steel. We expect these numbers to grow in 2023.

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 and power their operations with more renewable energy.

More-Sustainable Fuels

In January 2023, AWS started transitioning to hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) to power backup generators at our data center sites in Europe, with sites in Ireland and Sweden among the first to make the switch. HVO is a renewable, biodegradable, and non-toxic fuel that can be 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. In the future, AWS aims to use HVO at all its data center sites across Europe.

Keeping Technologies in Use Longer

We’re reducing emissions related to server use and networking equipment by increasing the lifespan of servers.

This includes refining our software to run more efficiently, which lowers stress on hardware and extends its useful life. Since 2020, AWS has delivered software updates that have extended useful server life from three years to five years. In 2022, we extended AWS server life from four years to five years and networking equipment from five years to six years. To support these efforts, AWS has a robust maintenance and repair program designed to increase component reuse and further reduce carbon emissions and waste across our 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. The forecast also shows how customers’ footprints will change as we stay on the path to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025.

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

Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative

The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) accelerates sustainability research and innovation by minimizing the cost and time required to acquire and analyze large sustainability datasets. ASDI also provides cloud grants to those interested in exploring the use of AWS’ technology and scalable infrastructure to solve big, long-term sustainability challenges with this data. The dual-pronged approach allows sustainability researchers to analyze massive amounts of data in mere minutes, regardless of where they are in the world or how much local storage space or computing capacity they can access.

Explore Resources to Get Involved in ASDI:

Promotional Credit

The AWS Promotional Credit Program supports experimentation and development for sustainability-related projects. Apply for Promotional Credit by completing the application online.

Request Credit

Host Your Data on AWS

The AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program covers the cost of storage for publicly available, high-value, cloud-optimized datasets.

Host Your Data

Tutorials and Tools

Check out the review tutorials and access open-source code.

Explore Tutorials

For additional information about ASDI, contact us by email at sustainability-data-initiative@amazon.com.

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