AI at the Crossroads: How Amazon’s 2024 Sustainability Report Reveals Progress, Complexities, and a New Era in Corporate Climate Responsibility

Amazon’s 2024 Sustainability Report arrives at a critical time: artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming its operations and sustainability profile, while sector-wide scrutiny of Big Tech’s climate impact is mounting. This year’s report not only details Amazon’s efforts to meet ambitious climate goals but takes a candid tone about the dual role of AI as both an operational engine and a sustainability challenge.

The Expanding Role of AI in Sustainability

AI is now deeply embedded throughout Amazon’s operations, embedded in over 1,000 applications that address everything from logistics optimization to energy management. Amazon underscores AI’s transformative potential, not simply as a productivity engine but as a sustainability toolkit. For example, AI-powered sizing tools help reduce customer returns, directly curbing the emissions and waste bound to reverse logistics. Automated monitoring systems use AI to detect anomalies in energy or water usage at data centers and fulfillment facilities, enabling faster, targeted efficiency improvements. Packaging innovations owe much to machine learning models that recommend optimal container sizes and materials, thus minimizing waste and reducing transport emissions.

Yet this success is coupled tightly to new environmental pressures. The company draws explicit attention in 2024 to the paradox that AI, particularly generative AI and associated data center expansions, drives up both electricity requirements and overall absolute emissions. Advanced chips for training and deploying large AI models demand more power and cooling than prior generations. Despite advances in chip efficiency and cooling systems, meaningful increases in electricity consumption occur as Amazon rolls out services like Nova (frontier model foundation AI), Bedrock, and Alexa+ at scale and both business and consumer adoption grows. Thus, while AI enables Amazon to operate more efficiently per transaction or per dollar of sales, the sheer scale of computational activity becomes a new emissions frontier to manage.

Year-Over-Year Trends: Progress and Setbacks

Amazon’s sustainability trajectory in 2024 marks both notable achievements and a reversal in key metrics. Most prominently, after two consecutive years of declining carbon emissions, Amazon’s absolute annual emissions increased by 6%, reaching 68.25 million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent. The company connects this uptick directly to the surge in data center construction and operation, specifically to support new AI capabilities and robust business growth overall.

This is of course, an industry issue. Both Microsoft and Google also reported an increase in their overall carbon emissions in 2024, largely attributed to the accelerated development and deployment of generative AI, machine learning, and cloud services driving up electricity consumption, supply chain emissions, and hardware production at a pace that current decarbonization strategies cannot yet fully offset.

Amazon’s carbon intensity—measured as grams of CO₂e per dollar of gross merchandise sales—continues a multi-year decline, dropping 4% year-over-year (from 75.6g to 72.6g CO₂e/$GMS). This metric, which has fallen approximately 40% since Amazon’s 2019 Climate Pledge, remains a crucial indicator of the effectiveness of Amazon’s efficiency efforts even as the company grows.

When rapid business expansion and aggressive AI deployment are essential to a company’s strategy, focusing on carbon intensity offers a clearer assessment of operational efficiency than absolute carbon emissions. Carbon intensity reflects how effectively a company can deliver more services, scale technology, or support sales growth without a proportional rise in energy use and emissions. In fast-moving, innovation-led sectors like cloud computing and artificial intelligence, where halting growth is neither practical nor desirable, improvements in carbon intensity demonstrate that the organization is making each unit of economic activity less carbon-intensive. This highlights successful investments in energy-efficient technology, sustainable infrastructure, and optimized processes, allowing stakeholders to track genuine progress in decoupling business growth from environmental impact, even when total emissions rise due to necessary expansion

Other year-over-year changes highlight both progress and consistency

•    The number of electric delivery vans surged from 19,000 in 2023 to over 31,400 in 2024, with Amazon meeting its target of more than 10,000 EVs in India a year ahead of schedule.

•    The proportion of electricity matched by renewables remained at 100% for the second consecutive year; Amazon also expanded to 621 renewable energy projects globally, including new investments in nuclear power.

•    Packaging improvements continued, with a global 16.4% reduction in single-use plastic packaging compared to 2023. Notably, all plastic air pillows were replaced by recyclable paper filler in North America, and 12% of all global packages were shipped without additional Amazon packaging.

•    Waste diversion rose slightly, with 85% of waste diverted from landfill (up from 84%).

•    AWS’s global data center power usage effectiveness improved to 1.15, better than the industry average of 1.25, a critical achievement given the cloud’s outsized energy demands.

New Themes and Innovations in the 2024 Report

Several shifts and new commitments distinguish this year’s report from previous years aside from the AI discussion:

•    Nuclear Energy Investments: Amazon has added nuclear power to its energy portfolio. Agreements supporting small modular reactors and strategic siting of data centers near existing nuclear plants mark a new tactic to ensure future clean, reliable energy for high-demand AI workloads.

•    Open-Sourcing Sustainability Tools: The launch of the Amazon Sustainability Exchange marks a new phase of industry engagement. Through this platform, Amazon shares previously proprietary playbooks and data with suppliers and the wider public sector, aiming to accelerate global decarbonization efforts.

•    Circularity and Waste: Beyond incremental percentage gains in waste diversion, Amazon expands on programmatic innovations, especially regarding repairs, re-commerce, and donation networks, as well as initiatives to increase the recyclability and durability of Amazon devices and operational equipment.

•    Water Stewardship: AWS’s commitment to become water positive by 2030 is on track, with 53% progress achieved and new data center projects leveraging recycled water for cooling. Amazon expanded commitments to return more water than it uses in its operations in India by 2027.

•    Product and Packaging Innovations: Partnerships with brands to redesign packaging for direct shipping, artificial intelligence for ship-in-product-packaging certifications, and piloting bio-based, recyclable mailers reflect an expanding—and open sourced—toolkit for sustainable logistics and delivery.

Amazon’s 2024 Sustainability Report delivers a nuanced reflection on the company’s environmental progress in a year dominated by the scaling of AI and cloud services. AI is both a lever for enormous efficiency and a fresh challenge, driving up energy consumption and emissions even as it enables granular optimizations in logistics, packaging, and resource management across the business.

Key new developments, including nuclear energy procurement and the Sustainability Exchange, suggest that Amazon recognizes the need for collaboration and technological diversity to tackle the sustainability paradoxes of the cloud and AI era. Looking forward, Amazon’s willingness to openly quantify setbacks as well as achievements will be essential as technology companies globally face mounting pressure to square digital innovation with urgent climate goals.

Chief Sustainability Officer, Kara Hurst, did not mince words in her opening letter to the report, making it clear that Amazon will not shy away from difficult realities or shifting landscapes: “While we are firm on our goals, our approach will continuously evolve with emerging challenges and opportunities, as we’re seeing with the rapid adoption of AI. No matter what we’re faced with in the future, we’ll remain steadfast in our commitment to sustainability and will continue to invest, innovate, and obsess over our progress each year, with the same intensity and focus that has defined Amazon from Day One.”

In a moment when many companies are quietly backtracking on climate pledges or growing reticent in their public commitments, Amazon’s stance is noticed. The company recognizes that sustainability now permeates everything from securing sufficient clean energy to power the next wave of AI, to staying ahead of regulatory requirements, to meeting rising expectations from consumers deeply invested in the planet’s future. For Amazon, the path forward blends relentless innovation, transparency, and a commitment to embed sustainability at the heart of growth, signaling to stakeholders that adaptation and ambition will remain at the center of its corporate DNA.