E-commerce giant Amazon’s overall emissions fell 3% last year as the company met a goal for all of the electricity it consumes globally to be matched with renewable power, it said on Wednesday.
The power used and emissions created by technology giants are under scrutiny as the growth of AI increases electricity consumption.
Amazon has a goal to reach net zero carbon by 2040 and in 2019 set a target to match 100% of its electricity consumption with renewable power by 2030 which it has now met.
Amazon’s total emissions were 68.82 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2023, down from 70.74 million tonnes the previous year, it said in its annual sustainability report.
Amazon’s total emissions include those generated from its supply chain, third party logistics and purchased electricity.
Emissions from the company’s direct operations, rose 7% to 14.27 million tonnes which Amazon said was due to an increase in the number of packages delivered by its in-house logistics team and overall business growth. This figure also includes its data centres.
“We know generative AI requires a lot of computing power. To power this demand while still progressing toward our climate goals, we’ll need different sources of energy than we’d originally projected,” Chris Roe, Amazon’s Director, Worldwide Carbon said via email.
Amazon invested in 112 new renewable projects last year and is the largest corporate purchaser of renewable electricity in the world according to Bloomberg NEF.
It said it also sometimes purchases renewable energy credits to bridge the gap between the time a renewable energy project is being built and when operations begin but did not say how many were used to meet the target.
To date Amazon has invested in more than 500 wind and solar projects globally representing 28 gigawatts of capacity, it said.