SUSTAINABILITY
As the world’ s largest cloud provider, Amazon Web Services( AWS) is at the centre of the digital economy’ s growing carbon footprint. Its strategy on emissions, energy and water is now a bellwether for the data centre industry and wider digital infrastructure sector.
AWS says its cloud is fundamentally more energy efficient than typical on‐premises IT, but scrutiny is intensifying as AI workloads drive new demand for power‐hungry infrastructure.
Energy efficiency and data centre design At group level, Amazon has committed to reaching net‐zero carbon by 2040 as part of The Climate Pledge, with AWS central to cutting operational emissions and enabling customer decarbonisation. According to Amazon’ s own analysis, AWS infrastructure can be up to 4.1 times more energy efficient than on‐premises facilities, reducing associated workload carbon footprints by as much as 99 % when customers optimise their architectures. Those numbers underpin AWS’ s argument that migrating workloads to its cloud is one of the fastest levers available to CIOs seeking to shrink Scope 2 emissions. The company is increasingly explicit about the environmental performance of its data centres as AI, high‐density compute and regulatory pressure converge.
In 2023, AWS disclosed a global data centre power usage effectiveness( PUE) of 1.15, compared with an industry average of around 1.25, signalling relatively low overhead energy use beyond the IT load.
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