As the teams that run AWS’s data centers innovate quickly, they are also focused on improving energy efficiency—whether from rack layouts to electrical distribution to cooling techniques. When it comes to carbon-free energy use in data centers: all of the electricity consumed by Amazon’s operations, including its data centers, was matched 100% renewable energy resources in 2023 and 2024. The company is investing billions of dollars in nuclear power and battery storage, and in financing large-scale renewable energy projects around the world to power its operations. In fact, for the past five years Amazon has been the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world. The company is still on a path to be net-zero carbon by 2040. This goal remains unchanged by the addition of Project Rainier, and its continued worldwide growth in general. Last year AWS announced it would be rolling out new data center components that combine advances in power, cooling, and hardware, not only for data centers it’s currently building, but also in existing facilities. New data center components are projected to reduce mechanical energy consumption by up to 46% and reduce embodied carbon in the concrete used by 35%. The new sites the company is constructing to support Project Rainier and beyond will include a variety of upgrades for energy efficiency and sustainability. Some of these will have a strong focus on water stewardship. AWS engineers its facilities to use as little water as possible, and where possible none at all. One way it does this is by eliminating cooling water use in many of its facilities for most of the year, instead relying on outside air. For example, data centers in St. Joseph County, Indiana—one of the Project Rainier sites—will maximize the use of outside air for cooling. From October to March the data centers won’t use any water for cooling at all, while on an average day from April to September they’ll only use cooling water for a few hours per day. Thanks to engineering innovations like this, AWS leads the industry in water efficiency. Based on findings from a recent Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) report on the data center industry’s water usage efficiency (WUE), the industry standard measure of how efficiently water is used inside data centers is 0.375 liters of water per kilowatt-hour. At 0.15 liters of water per kilowatt hour, AWS’s WUE is more than twice as good as than the industry average. It’s also a 40% improvement since 2021.