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AWS Sustainability

AWS Sustainable Infrastructure

Designing, building, and operating more efficient data centers

Sustainable infrastructure for every AI workload

AWS is building data centers to support the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) innovation and customers’ evolving needs. These capabilities combine innovations in power, cooling, and hardware design to create a more energy efficient data center that will underpin further customer innovation. As we grow, we invest relentlessly in efficiency. When a business moves from an on-premises data center to AWS, research estimates that data is processed 4.1 times more efficiently.

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New data center components to support AI innovation

AWS data centers use a more efficient cooling system that is expected to reduce mechanical energy consumption by up to 50% compared to its previous design during peak cooling conditions, without increasing water usage on a per-megawatt basis. Design changes include a new single-sided cooling system, reduction in cooling equipment, and introduction of liquid cooling capabilities.

Accelerate innovation with AWS Silicon Chips

Customers can accelerate their sustainability innovation using AWS Silicon chips and leverage them to run their cloud workloads more sustainably. A 2024 Accenture study shows that customers running compute-heavy workloads can see carbon emissions reduce by up to 99%, with reduction of up to 94% by moving from on-premises to AWS, and an additional reduction up to 81% using AWS’s purpose-built silicon.

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AWS-designed silicon for efficient workloads

AWS Graviton

AWS Graviton-based Amazon EC2 instances use up to 60% less energy than comparable EC2 instances for the same performance. They also provide the best price performance for cloud workloads running on Amazon EC2. Over 70,000 customers have used AWS Graviton to build efficient and performant workloads.

Optimizing efficiency across our operations

Flexible cooling design for AI processors

AWS has developed novel mechanical cooling solutions providing configurable liquid-to-chip cooling in both new and existing data centers. Some AWS technologies utilize network and storage infrastructure that does not require liquid cooling, so updated cooling systems will seamlessly integrate air and liquid cooling capabilities for the most powerful AI chipsets, like AWS Trainium3 and rack-scale AI supercomputing solutions like NVIDIA GB200 NVL72, as well as AWS’s network switches and storage servers. This flexible, cooling design allows us to provide maximum performance and efficiency at the lowest cost, whether running traditional workloads or AI models. 
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Support for high-density AI workloads

AWS is maximizing how power is used by optimizing how we position racks in a data center. This was achieved through software, powered by data and generative AI, that predicts the most efficient way to land servers. AWS will now reduce the amount of stranded power – energy that is available but unused or underutilized – and make more efficient use of the energy available.
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Custom hardware to minimize the use of water

We developed the In-Row Heat Exchanger (IRHX), which captures heat directly from high-density AI hardware at the rack before the heat spreads, reducing how often water-based cooling needs to run. As we add more AI racks with IRHX, we expect a 9% reduction in water use compared to evaporative air-cooled data centers once fully operational.

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Circular operations: design better, operate longer, recover more

13%
of spare parts, sourced from AWS own reuse inventory in 2024. And we expect this number to grow as we expand our efforts
23.5M
components recycled or sold on the secondary market
30%
of plastic server rack components made of recycled or bio-based plastic
+2yrs
extended lifespan of Amazon hard disk drives