Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sat down Thursday with Kara Hurst, the company’s chief sustainability officer, to discuss the cloud, retail and entertainment giant’s efforts to meet a pledge of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2040.
“When we announced the climate pledge in 2019, we didn’t really have a plan on how we’d get there,” Jassy said. “We knew how we’d get a good chunk of the way there … but there’s still a lot of innovation left to happen.”
Amazon has its $2 billion Climate Pledge Fund to invest in companies that are developing technologies that can helpit meet the goal. That includes low-carbon steel and concrete for building its data and fulfillment centers, and sustainable aviation startups for transporting goods.
“We’ve spent the last couple years really refining that plan such that we have confidence that we’re going to get there. And it’s a lot of work left,” said Jassy, speaking at the Climate Pledge Summit in New York City. The event was one of many held during the city’s annual Climate Week.
Amazon has made progress on reducing its climate ledger. After years of moving in the wrong direction, the company’s carbon footprint shrank by 3% last year, marking its second straight year of decline.
However, tech companies including Amazon are beefing up their data center expansions in order to provide the computational power needed to support the growing use of artificial intelligence and generative AI. The processing chips, data center construction and power to run it all consume huge amounts of energy and have giant carbon impacts.
Amazon continues investing in clean electricity sources such as wind and solar, and more recently it and Microsoft have started adding nuclear energy to their portfolios. But the efforts are lagging behind demand, leading to continued and increasing use of fossil fuels such as natural gas to power the data center operations.
Amazon for the last four years has ranked as the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy, and Jassy said he expects to retain that title for “several years to come,” Axios reported. Echoing the company’s latest sustainability report, he also highlighted the role of nuclear power.
Jassy acknowledged that there’s a lot at stake with its climate efforts.
“Our customers care about this, our partners care about this, our employees care about this. And so, we’ve been working really hard over the last many years to incorporate changes into how we operate to be more environmentally friendly,” he said. “If you want the planet to be inhabitable for our kids and our kids’ kids, we have to make changes.”
RELATED: Amazon’s carbon footprint shrank 3% last year — but AI-driven climate challenges loom
