Amazon’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, is joining other tech giants with a “long-term commitment to achieve 100% renewable energy usage for our global infrastructure footprint,” Wired reported last month.
“Over the past few years, Apple, Google, and Facebook pledged to run their online empires on renewable energy, and considering how large these empires have become—how many data centres and machines are now required to keep them going—this was a vital thing,” Finley writes. Until now Amazon, the world’s biggest cloud computing company, had resisted the trend.
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“If Amazon cuts its emissions, it could have a significant impact on the tech industry’s carbon footprint,” Finley notes. But “Greenpeace IT analyst Gary Cook pointed out that, unlike its peers, Amazon hasn’t published a roadmap outlining its plans to wean itself off dirty energy. That makes it harder to assess how serious the company really is.”
