Simon Frost Amazon Web Services (AWS) Head of industry marketing
When did you first realise the severity of the environmental crisis? Amazon takes the environmental crisis very seriously, committing to build a sustainable business for our customers and the planet. In 2019, Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge – a commitment to reach net zero carbon across our business by 2040. That is ten years ahead of the Paris Agreement. How will the climate crisis affect your business and the industry? Customers and partners that are serious about reducing their carbon footprint should consider how quickly they can move all of their workloads to the cloud. A study conducted by analyst firm 451 Research found that moving on-premises workloads to AWS can lower the carbon footprint of a workload by 88% in enterprise data centres, and 72% on average for the most efficient enterprises. In the study, the AWS infrastructure was found to be 3.6 times more energy efficient than the average enterprise data centre, with more than two thirds of this advantage owing to a more energy-efficient server population and higher server utilisation. While most enterprises reported being pragmatic or aggressive with their workload consolidation practices, 451 Research found that the average server utilisation rate was only about 18%, leaving a significant amount of capacity completely unused. AWS also has early access to the latest server technology, adopting new, energy-efficient server platforms faster than most enterprise data centres, adding to the lower carbon footprint achievable on AWS.
What changes have you made to get to zero carbon? What changes do you plan to make? To meet Amazon’s Climate Pledge commitment to reach net zero carbon by 2040, we have to reduce a broad category of emissions – known as Scope 3 indirect emissions. These include emission sources that are not directly controlled by us, but still result from our business operations – such as employee travel and office expenses. For AWS, our largest sources of indirect emissions stem from constructing our data centres and manufacturing our hardware. Our sustainability, engineering, construction and procurement teams are hard at work on these problems. To reduce our Scope 3 emissions, the team is using recycled by-products from other industrial processes, such as manufacturing iron and steel, to replace carbon-intensive materials in the cement that we use in data centre construction. We expect that increasing the amount of these replacement materials can reduce the embodied carbon of a data centre by about 25%. In the longer term, we continue to work to develop solutions beyond current substitutes, and we are working with partners on alternatives that are made with different processes, resulting in lower emissions. If you had the power to universally mandate one behavioural change, what would it be? Conservation! The greenest energy is the energy that we don’t use. That’s why AWS has been, and remains, laser-focused on improving efficiency in every aspect of our infrastructure. From the highly available infrastructure that powers our servers, to techniques we use to cool our data centres – as well as the innovative server designs we provide to our customers – energy efficiency is a key goal of every part of our global infrastructure. Who is your favourite scientist (past or present)? My favourite scientist is Albert Einstein. His work on gravity, energy, light and quantum theory has benefitted us all greatly. One of the earliest equations I can recall from school is E=MC².
THE GREENEST ENERGY IS THE ENERGY THAT WE DON’T USE
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