Amazon Web Services will support construction and operation of a wind farm in western Indiana to produce power for its massive data centres.
The facility could enter service as early as 2016, and it’s expected to generate 500,000 megawatt-hours of power per year.
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Amazon’s data centres, “known as ‘regions’ in company parlance, are huge energy hogs, sucking up power for computer servers used to run its website and Internet operations at other companies, including Netflix, Pinterest, and the Central Intelligence Agency,” the Times reports.
The wind farm, to be built by Pattern Energy Group, “will bring a new source of clean energy to the electric grid where we currently operate a large number of data centers and have ongoing expansion plans to support our growing customer base,” said AWS Vice President Jerry Hunter.
Late last year, Wired reported that Amazon had joined other tech giants in committing to a 100% renewable energy future, but had not said how it would reach the target.