The Scoop
Amazon’s carbon footprint is rising because of its data center buildout, and will continue to do so for years to come, the company’s sustainability chief told Semafor.
The tech giant’s global greenhouse gas emissions increased in 2025 for the second consecutive year, from 69.5 million metric tons in 2024 to 80.8 million, according to its latest sustainability report, published Wednesday. Its operations also became more carbon-intensive for the first time since it started to track this metric in 2019 — increasing to 113 grams per dollar of revenue, from 109 in 2024 — meaning the higher emissions are not the result of business growth alone.
The change is a setback in Amazon’s goal to be completely carbon neutral by 2040 — a target that is already the most challenging of the company’s Big Tech peers, given its vast network of retail operations. Amazon is tied with Meta as the world’s top corporate buyer of low-carbon power. But it is also leading the pack for data center construction and power procurement. Amazon declined to disclose the exact mix of its data center power generation sources, but across the tech industry in general the vast majority of data center operations are fueled by natural gas.
The emissions bump “was obviously expected,” Amazon’s CSO Kara Hurst said in an interview. “This isn’t going to be linear. It’s not going to be a one-year story.”
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Tim’s view
Amazon’s new sustainability stats are the latest signal that Big Tech hasn’t yet figured out how to reconcile its climate goals with its AI ambitions — and that for now, there’s a clear winner in the tug-of-war between those objectives.
Amazon’s not alone here: It’s the first of its cohort to publish 2025 figures, but Google, Meta, and others have also recently recorded emissions hikes, driven by data center construction and operations. While most power company executives agree that solar-plus-batteries is the fastest and cheapest form of new generation to build, tech firms still seem to harbor some anxiety about renewables being able to provide enough juice — and in many cases, are simply locked in to whatever power plants already exist on the grid in a given location. In Amazon’s case, emissions from purchased electricity jumped 34% year-on-year in 2025. For now, there’s simply not enough clean power available, Hurst said, because of the familiar litany of bottlenecks with permitting and grid interconnection.
“Power availability is a challenge right now,” she said. “So is grid modernization, and so are a number of other things in the US, but we’re working on all of these issues.”
Power is only part of the problem. The company also reported a 20% bump in its supply chain emissions, which account for three-quarters of its total carbon footprint. In particular, data center construction materials have become a big problem, Hurst said, and the company is stepping up its investment in lower-carbon steel and concrete. It’s also still battling to get its sprawling network of global suppliers to agree and implement their own carbon-cutting plans.
In the meantime, Hurst is looking forward to “catalytic” energy tech breakthroughs, such as advanced small-scale nuclear, to break the data center emissions pattern. Any plan that relies on nuclear energy breakthroughs on a tight timeline carries plenty of risk. But Hurst remains confident about hitting net zero on time. “2040 is a really ambitious goal, but we are absolutely gunning towards it,” she said. “I don’t see any alternative to that.”
Room for Disagreement
Despite the concerning headline emissions figures, some of the company’s sustainability goals are still moving in the right direction. Amazon’s emissions per dollar of revenue — though up in 2025 compared to the prior year — is down 38% overall from where it started in 2019. The company is also on track to meet its 2030 goal of returning more water to local watersheds than its data centers consume. And it has deployed 53,000 electric delivery trucks since 2019, putting it more than halfway to the goal of 100,000 EVs in its fleet by 2030.
“We would not be successful at growing our business sustainably if we were not able to understand the goals that our business unit leaders are trying to achieve themselves, and then how sustainability can help them meet those goals,” Hurst said.
Notable
- Climate change itself is the latest threat to data center development, CNBC reported. Extreme weather is now a leading cause of damage and loss for many data center operators.