Amazon's 2024 Sustainability Report, published in mid-July, shows the company's total carbon emissions rose 6% in 2024 to 68.25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, up from 64.38 million metric tons in 2023. It is the first annual increase since 2021, when the company's emissions rose during the pandemic-era expansion of its logistics network.
Bloomberg and Fast Company reported that the increase was driven mainly by the construction of data centers and by fuel use among third-party delivery providers. The report also cites electricity demand linked to the growth of Amazon Web Services, including AI workloads.
Amazon says its carbon intensity, measured as emissions per dollar of gross merchandise sales, fell 4% in 2024, while its business grew 11%. The company frames that as evidence that emissions are growing more slowly than the business, though absolute emissions still rose.
Where the emissions come from
Amazon's footprint has a different shape from those of Microsoft and Google because of its retail and logistics operations. A large share of emissions comes from transportation, including trucking, air freight and last-mile delivery, and from purchased goods and services, including the products it sells under its own brands and the materials used in construction.
The data center component appears in two places. Electricity consumed by data centers falls under Scope 2, which Amazon reports on a market-based basis that accounts for its renewable energy purchases. Construction of new data centers, including the steel, concrete and servers, falls under Scope 3. The 2024 increase came largely through the second channel, as Amazon expanded AWS capacity to meet demand for cloud and AI services.
Renewable energy procurement
Amazon has been the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world for several years by contracted volume, according to BloombergNEF rankings that the company cites. It says it matched all the electricity consumed across its operations with renewable energy in 2024, as it did in 2023, seven years ahead of its original 2030 target.
Matching is calculated on an annual basis, meaning total renewable energy purchased over the year equals total electricity consumed. It does not mean that every hour of consumption was met with renewable supply on the same grid. This is a common approach among large corporate buyers, but it differs from Google's hourly matching goal and from standards that some policymakers and researchers have proposed for clean hydrogen and other uses.
Nuclear and new supply
In 2024 Amazon signed agreements related to nuclear power, including an investment in X-energy, a developer of small modular reactors, and agreements with utilities including Dominion Energy in Virginia and Energy Northwest in Washington state to explore new reactors. It also bought a data center campus next to Talen Energy's Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, a deal that has drawn regulatory scrutiny over how data centers co-located at power plants share grid costs.
These agreements aim to secure firm, carbon-free power to complement wind and solar. Most of the new nuclear capacity involved will not be available until the 2030s, which means AWS growth in the next few years will draw on existing grids, new renewables, storage, and in some regions new gas generation built by utilities.
The Climate Pledge
Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge in 2019, committing to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. The 2024 increase moves the company further from a straight-line path to that goal. Amazon has said the path will not be linear and that it expects variation from year to year as the business invests in new capacity.
The company has invested in electric delivery vehicles, including a large order of vans from Rivian, and in lower-carbon materials for construction. It also buys carbon removal credits and has invested in direct air capture projects.
How Amazon compares
Amazon's report follows those of Microsoft and Google, which also showed rising emissions linked to data center expansion. Microsoft reported total emissions 23.4% above its 2020 baseline in its most recent report, and Google reported a 51% increase from its 2019 baseline. In each case, operational emissions from electricity were held down by large clean power purchases, while construction and supply chain emissions grew.
The comparison is imperfect because the companies use different baselines, boundaries and accounting methods. Amazon's absolute emissions are far larger than those of Microsoft or Google because of its retail and logistics operations.
Implications for energy markets
For electricity markets, Amazon's report confirms the trend of rising data center load. AWS is one of the largest data center operators in Northern Virginia, the world's largest data center market, where Dominion Energy has reported a large and growing volume of data center connection requests. Utilities in Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Mississippi and elsewhere are planning new generation and transmission to serve AWS and other hyperscale customers.
The co-location question is particularly relevant. Federal regulators have been considering how data centers located at existing power plants should pay for grid services. The outcome will affect whether hyperscalers can draw directly from existing nuclear plants without paying full transmission charges, which in turn affects power supply available to other customers.
For renewable energy developers, large corporate buyers like Amazon remain an important source of long-term contracts. Changes to federal tax credits for wind and solar, enacted in July 2025, may affect project economics and therefore the price of new corporate power purchase agreements.
The delivery side of the ledger
The second driver named in coverage of the report, fuel used by third-party delivery providers, is a reminder that Amazon's footprint is tied to oil as well as electricity. Last-mile delivery, middle-mile trucking and air cargo all run mostly on diesel and jet fuel. Electrification of delivery vans is under way, but heavy trucks and aircraft have fewer low-carbon options at commercial scale. That part of the footprint responds to fuel prices and freight volumes, which makes it sensitive to oil market conditions in a way the data center side is not.
What to watch
Key indicators in Amazon's next report will be whether construction-related emissions keep rising as AWS capital spending increases, how much of its new load is met by additional clean power on the same grids, and progress on its nuclear projects. Regulatory decisions on co-location and large-load tariffs in PJM and other markets will shape how much new AWS capacity connects to the grid, and on what terms.