A display promoting Amazon’s sustainability efforts at the Bloomberg Green Seattle event yesterday. Amazon was the prime sponsor of the three-day conference. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler)

Amazon recently released its 2024 Amazon Sustainability Report, showing that after two years of modest declines its absolute carbon footprint grew by 6% last year. The increase is attributed to the growth of AI and mirrors the challenges being faced by fellow cloud giants Microsoft and Google, which are all deploying more electricity-hungry data centers to try and keep up with the expanding use of artificial intelligence.

“As we harness generative AI’s potential and our AI business continues to grow rapidly, we are investing in the infrastructure that we’ll need to make AI innovation possible. We’re also tackling one of its greatest challenges head on, rising energy demand,” said Kara Hurst, Amazon’s chief sustainability officer, in the forward to the company’s annual sustainability report.

The global cloud and online retail giant hit 68.25 million metric tons of carbon emissions — for comparison, that’s about two-thirds of the annual amount emitted by entire state of Washington.

Despite the increase in its absolute carbon footprint, the report highlights several reductions and bright spots as well, including:

  • 76 new signatories joined the Climate Pledge, an international effort led by Amazon to get companies working towards zero carbon emissions. The effort has 549 participants.
  • Amazon has more than 31,400 electric delivery vans in its fleet and is working towards 100,000 by the end of this decade.
  • The company matches 100% of its electricity use with clean power sources, a target that it hit in 2023 and has sustained.
  • Amazon Web Services is 53% of its way toward the goal of being water positive by 2030, which means returning more water to communities than it uses. Traditional data centers gulp water to keep their electronics cool.

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