Amazon’s emissions increased 6 percent last year, as the e-commerce and cloud computing giant continued to expand its artificial intelligence (AI) efforts and build out its data center footprint.
The company’s total emissions ticked up from 64.38 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2023 to 68.25 metric tons in 2024, according to its annual sustainability report.
“Today, in virtually every corner of Amazon, we’re using generative AI to make customers’ lives better and easier — and while we’ve made a lot of progress, we’re still at the relative beginning,” Amazon wrote. “One of the biggest challenges with scaling AI is increased energy demands for data centers.”
AI requires vast amounts of energy. As major tech firms race to develop the technology, this has weighed on their efforts to cut emissions.
Amazon launched The Climate Pledge in 2019, setting the goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2040. The e-commerce firm’s total emissions ticked down in both 2022 and 2023 before rising this past year.
Nearly three-fourths of the company’s carbon footprint came from indirect emissions from other sources, primarily data center construction and fuel consumed by third-party delivery service providers, it noted.
Last month, Amazon announced it was investing $10 billion in North Carolina and $20 billion in Pennsylvania to build out its data center infrastructure in the two states.
It has increasingly turned to nuclear energy as a way to power its AI push without raising emissions. Last year, the company announced a series of deals to build several small modular nuclear reactors and purchased a data center colocated with a traditional nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.
