Commercial, Energy Efficiency, GHG Emissions  -  December 6, 2024

AWS Utilizes More Energy-Efficient Data Center Components

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) announced new data center components designed to support the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) and that it will deploy tech innovations in power, cooling and hardware design to create a more energy-efficient data center.

These new capabilities will be implemented globally in AWS’s new data centers. Many components are already deployed in its existing data centers. 

Construction on new AWS data centers with the full set of components is expected to begin in early 2025 in the U.S. 

“AWS continues to relentlessly innovate its infrastructure to build the most performant, resilient, secure, and sustainable cloud for customers worldwide,” said Prasad Kalyanaraman, vice president of Infrastructure Services at AWS, in a statement. “These data center capabilities represent an important step forward with increased energy efficiency and flexible support for emerging workloads. But what is even more exciting is that they are designed to be modular, so that we are able to retrofit our existing infrastructure for liquid cooling and energy efficiency to power generative AI applications and lower our carbon footprint.”

As use of generative AI continues to grow and GPU capacity demands increase, AWS data centers are adapting to support increasingly higher power densities. Key improvements include simplified electrical and mechanical design for high availability; innovations in cooling, rack design and control systems; and increased energy efficiency and sustainability, including a 46% reduction in mechanical energy consumption and a 35% reduction in embodied carbon in the concrete used.