Amazon’s Push for AI Leadership Clashes With Decarbonization Goals
Amazon’s latest sustainability report reveals a troubling trend: its carbon emissions grew in 2024 for the first time since 2022. The company attributes much of this six percent increase to its rapid expansion of data centers, which are critical to its ambitions in generative AI.
The report highlights the environmental cost of AI infrastructure. AI chips demand significantly more electricity and cooling than traditional chips, driving up energy consumption. Beyond operational power needs, Amazon is also constructing new data centers at a rapid pace, contributing to indirect emissions from construction and logistics. These factors pushed indirect emissions up by six percent, while the company’s direct fossil fuel emissions rose by seven percent.
Critics have long accused Amazon of downplaying its environmental impact. The company has faced allegations of undercounting emissions by excluding key metrics. In 2022, Amazon revised its reporting methodology, resulting in a sudden drop in its carbon footprint figures—raising questions about transparency.
Despite these setbacks, Amazon remains committed to The Climate Pledge, a net-zero initiative it co-founded, aiming for carbon neutrality by 2040. The pledge now includes 549 companies, from MasterCard to Sony. However, the company’s heavy investment in AI infrastructure threatens to derail progress.
Earlier this year, CEO Andy Jassy announced plans to invest $100 billion in 2025, with much of that funding directed toward Amazon Web Services (AWS), its cloud and data center division. Given the ongoing construction boom, emissions are likely to keep rising in next year’s report.
The tension between Amazon’s AI ambitions and sustainability goals underscores a broader challenge for Big Tech. As companies race to dominate AI, the environmental costs of data centers and high-power computing are becoming harder to ignore. Amazon’s struggle to balance growth with decarbonization may serve as a cautionary tale for the industry.
