Amazon Knows What Really Powers The AI Boom — And It Isn’t Wind And Solar

For years, Amazon has been one of corporate America’s key poster children for climate virtue signaling. No company in the country has contracted for more “carbon free” power gen — 25.6 gigawatts of it, including 17.9 GW of solar and 4.4 GW of wind according to a new report from the research firm Cleanview.

But when it comes to keeping its servers running around the clock, Amazon is doing what most serious players in the data center business are doing — turning to natural gas.

Cleanview finds that utilities and independent power producers are currently building 8 power plants totaling 17.5 GW of new gas-fired generation to serve Amazon. That equates to about 1.5 times New York City’s peak demand. It is also, in Cleanview’s words, a gas fleet the company “doesn’t talk about much publicly.”

Oh.

The scale of Amazon’s ambitions helps explain the choice of power source. Cleanview counts 44 GW of Amazing data centers under development in 16 states, on top of 13.9 GW already in operation. The company says it expects to spend $220 billion on capital projects this year, 3.5 times what it spent in 2022.

For years, Amazon plugged into utilities with spare capacity in Virginia, Ohio and Oregon, then signed renewable power contracts to “match” its consumption on paper. It was a popular model across the industry in its early days, in fact. Cleanview reports that model broke within a two-year window as the utilities “simply ran out of power.” Amazon, still tied into the data center industry’s 99.999% uptime requirement, had to go elsewhere to acquire the reliable, cheap, 24/7 natural gas power gen it needed.