Amazon.com Inc. says its carbon emissions fell for the second year in a row in 2023 as the company reduced spending on new warehouses and cloud computing data centers.
The e-commerce giant’s greenhouse gas emissions fell 3% last year to 68.82 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. The reduction was driven by a 13% decline in emissions related to capital goods, including construction and equipment purchases. The Seattle-based company’s capital expenditures fell by about $10 billion in 2023 as it worked to overcome a pandemic-era storage glut and cut spending on the data centers that power Amazon Web Services.
The data, published in Amazon’s annual sustainability report on Wednesday, contrasts with disclosures from rivals Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which are struggling to reduce their emissions amid a surge in demand for data centers needed for artificial intelligence. Amazon itself has committed to spending more than $150 billion on data centers over the next 15 years, so it could face similar setbacks in the future.
Amazon’s expanding internal logistics business generates roughly the same amount of emissions as warm the planet than Google’s entire operation and hides the impact of building data centers. Amazon does not break down AWS emissions.
The company currently plans to reduce its carbon emissions to zero by 2040. Its most high-profile effort — the purchase of 100,000 electric delivery vans made by Rivian Automotive Inc. — is starting to pay off. Amazon is now looking to use more sustainable jet fuel along with cleaner concrete and steel in its buildings.
Amazon has also incorporated climate metrics into its planning processes in an effort to show employees the impact of new initiatives on the carbon budget. of the company, said Kara Hurst, who leads the sustainability teams.
“It’s not a linear path,” Hurst said of progress toward net-zero emissions. “We’re going to see changes.” There are things like AI that are going to come along and we’re going to have to deal with, but I think we have so many tools that we didn’t have even a couple of years ago. It’s a very different playing field.”
Amazon also said Wednesday that it has purchased enough renewable energy in 2023 to match the amount of electricity consumed by its operations.reaching ahead of schedule a goal that Jeff Bezos set five years ago when he announced that Amazon intended to eliminate its greenhouse gas emissions.
Most corporate claims for 100% renewable energy are based on the use of renewable energy creditswhich are essentially royalties on the electrons produced by a solar or wind farm. A Bloomberg investigation has shown that such credits do not always reduce emissions.
Amazon, currently the world’s largest corporate sponsor of renewable energy, says it relies on such credits in part to bridge the gap between now and now when it agrees to finance the projects and when they become operational.
Amazon’s carbon intensity, a measure of how much it emits per dollar in sales, has fallen by about a third since Bezos announced the company’s carbon targets in 2019. Absolute emissions rose 34% over that period.
