AWS’ Carbon Footprint: Inside the Cloud Giant’s Green Push

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.

Renewable energy, water and embodied carbon

Renewable energy is a second major pillar of AWS’s carbon strategy. Amazon reports that since 2023 it has matched 100% of the electricity consumed by its global operations, including AWS, with renewable energy purchases – maintaining its position as the world’s largest corporate buyer of renewables for several years running. 

That procurement scale helps lower the carbon intensity of each kilowatt‑hour used in AWS data centres, though campaign groups and analysts continue to challenge the quality and additionality of some projects and certificates.

Beyond electricity, AWS is increasingly linking its carbon footprint to water and materials.

Data centre cooling is a major focus, with AWS committing to becoming water positive by 2030, meaning it will return more water to communities than it uses in its direct operations. 

By the end of 2024, AWS said it had reached 53% of the way towards this goal, up from 41% in 2023, aided by expanding recycled‑water cooling to more locations and cutting water use significantly versus conventional systems in some deployments. This, in turn, reduces the indirect emissions associated with water treatment and movement while addressing growing local scrutiny of data centre water use.

Embodied carbon in construction materials is also moving up the agenda. AWS says its global data centre programme is increasingly using lower‑carbon concrete and reducing steel volumes in new builds, embedding these specifications into standard design rather than treating them as one‑off interventions.

Customer carbon tools and transparency

On the customer side, AWS has invested in tooling to make cloud‑related emissions more visible and actionable. 

Its Customer Carbon Footprint Tool now provides carbon data at a finer resolution and publishes estimates for customers’ usage within 21 days of the end of each month, down from a previous lag of up to three months.

Faster data, combined with regional emissions factors, is intended to help enterprises adjust architectures, shift workloads between regions and evaluate the carbon impact of new AI services in near real time.

Championing corporate responsibility

Senior leaders at AWS have started to frame sustainability as both a responsibility and a competitive differentiator in cloud. 

“Amazon’s Climate Pledge goal to reach net zero carbon by 2040 requires us to innovate across every part of our operations, including how we source the materials that power our infrastructure,” says Amazon’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Kara Hurst, discussing AWS’ recent partnership with Rio Tinto to source lower-carbon copper. 

“As we continue to invest in next-generation carbon-free energy technology and expand our data centre operations, securing access to lower-carbon materials produced close to home strengthens both our supply chain resilience and our ability to decarbonise at scale,” adds Kara.