Climate change
According to the Guardian, Amazon’s scope 2 emissions (which come from the electricity it purchases) are 1.2x higher than the company claims. Although Amazon reports on its greenhouse gas emissions, its scope 2 emissions are, for example, calculated using a method (known as market-based reporting) which makes the figures look smaller than they actually are.
Its scope 3 emissions (those in its supply chain) only included Amazon-branded products. According to the organisation Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, Amazon’s own-branded products make up just 1% of sales. This suggests that Amazon’s scope 3 emissions could be 100 times more than claimed by the company.
Data centres
AWS owns about a third of the entire cloud market.
Data centres are buildings full of computers. The computers store the Cloud and all its web pages, databases, video content, photos, and applications. They require huge amounts of electricity to power them and huge amounts to cool them down with air conditioning. Worldwide, almost 600 hyperscale data centres accounted for around 1% or 2% of global electricity demand in 2020.
Data centres are likely a big part of AWS’ overall carbon emissions. According to Data Center Dynamics, AWS operated over 38 million square feet (3.55 million m2) of data centre and office space in 2023. This represents a 14% increase over 2022.
AWS has some data centres in Ireland. According to Not Here Not Anywhere (NHNA), data centres account for about one-fifth of all electricity use in Ireland and it is predicted to increase to over a quarter by 2028. Although renewable electricity generation is on the rise, data centre expansion may outpace this. NHNA says that in some cases “a data centre is used as justification for building new fossil fuel infrastructure”.
Amazon Employees for Climate Justice recently said that despite the company claiming that its operations are run entirely on renewable sources of power, in truth just 22% of power used by the company's data centres is from renewables.
AWS announced in late 2024 that, in order to meet demands for power for its data centres, it is investing more than $500 million (£390 million) in the development of a small modular nuclear reactor.
Water usage
According to a case study by the University of Oxford, up to 43% of data centre electricity in the US is used for cooling. The electricity is used to evaporate or spray water to cool down the equipment. Traditional types of cooling in a relatively small data centre can use 26 million litres of water per year. However, the largest amount of water is used for electricity generation. Fossil fuels and nuclear power all consume water in this way, and even hydroelectric power involves some water loss from reservoirs.
Amazon has recently said that it is going “water positive” but it didn’t take water usage for electricity generation into account. This is a serious concern as, in the race to develop AI, it is planning to spend over $100 billion (£77 billion) building data centres in the next decade.