Amazon is a unique company. The diverse nature of our business allows us to test new sustainability solutions across industries. When we discover a solution in one area, we can quickly adopt it across our business, helping us move faster toward our sustainability goals. As a customer-obsessed company, we find this approach helps us make our customers’ lives better and easier every day, while making our operations more sustainable.
We’re developing cutting-edge AI, delivering packages at record speeds, creating award-winning entertainment, advancing healthcare solutions, and promoting global broadband access—while simultaneously reducing waste, expanding carbon-free energy, using lower-carbon building materials, protecting forests, protecting and furthering human rights, and helping our communities recover from global disasters.
Amazon’s culture also encourages us to ask “Why?” at every turn. When we ask why sustainability matters, the answer is clear: Sustainability is not separate from our customer obsession—it’s an extension of it. Solutions that benefit the environment can create superior experiences for our customers and also become an economic driver that helps to strengthen communities and protect the planet. In 2024, we demonstrated this repeatedly across our business, with sustainability innovations directly enhancing customer experiences. For example, our ongoing packaging innovations meant customers had fewer boxes to break down and now zero air pillows to pop.
2024 also marked a turning point for artificial intelligence (AI). It’s a transformative technology that we believe will reinvent virtually every customer experience, as well as create new experiences altogether that we only once dreamed would be possible. Over the last few years, Amazon has accelerated its investments in generative AI to build these experiences across our business and, including through the 1,000-plus AI applications we’re developing across Amazon. We introduced Amazon Q, the most capable AI-powered coding assistant; SageMaker, a service that makes it easier to build foundation models; Amazon Bedrock, which allows developers to do GenAI inference at scale; our own frontier model, Amazon Nova, to give customers leading intelligence at lower latency and cost; and we’re rolling out Alexa+, our next-generation Alexa personal assistant that’s meaningfully smarter, more capable, and is the first personal assistant that can take significant actions for customers. We’ve also harnessed AI as a powerful sustainability tool—optimizing sizing recommendations to reduce returns, identifying energy inefficiencies, detecting water leaks, and avoiding packaging—solving countless environmental challenges while simultaneously improving service quality. And we’re just at the beginning.
As we harness generative AI’s potential and our AI business continues to grow rapidly, we are investing in the infrastructure that we’ll need to make AI innovation possible. We’re also tackling one of its greatest challenges head on, rising energy demand. Rather than viewing this as a limitation for sustainability, we see it as an opportunity we’re facing head-on to pioneer sustainability solutions at scale through our AWS business for our customers and our suppliers.
In 2024, we unveiled breakthrough data center innovations in power systems, cooling technology, and hardware architecture that will simultaneously support next-generation AI capabilities while improving energy efficiency—proving that technological progress and sustainability can advance in tandem. We’re also diversifying and expanding our carbon-free energy portfolio, which includes our first investments in nuclear energy, alongside maintaining our position as the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for the fifth consecutive year. Through these complementary approaches—optimizing efficiency while scaling carbon-free energy—we’re creating a more sustainable foundation that AI needs to fulfill its world-changing potential.
AI is already embedded in much of this work, but when our customers think about sustainability at Amazon, it’s most often associated with our retail business, which we’ve made more sustainable too. In 2024, we delivered at faster speeds than ever before, with 10 billion items delivered the same or next day around the world. At the same time, our growing fleet of over 30,000 electric delivery vehicles helped deliver 1.5 billion packages globally. Across our global operations, we eliminated all plastic air pillows and replaced them with recyclable paper filler. We also reduced our total plastic packaging by 16.4%. We’ve been keenly focused on preventing and diverting waste, and in 2024, 85% of our waste was diverted from landfill.
As we continue to champion sustainability solutions for our customers, we’re doing the same for our partners and suppliers. As of today, over 550 companies have committed to The Climate Pledge and are choosing to come together to drive joint action and fast-track decarbonization solutions. In that same spirit of collaboration, we’re engaging our suppliers to set their own sustainability goals. To accelerate collective progress, we launched The Sustainability Exchange, sharing our playbooks and previously proprietary insights freely with businesses worldwide. This collaborative approach multiplies our impact by allowing companies to build on proven solutions, combines our collective resources to tackle our greatest environmental challenges, and drives industry-wide momentum with a powerful blend of urgency and optimism.
Looking ahead, we recognize that the path to being a more sustainable company will never be linear, because we’re charting new territory at an unprecedented scale. While we are firm on our goals, our approach will continuously evolve with emerging challenges and opportunities, as we’re seeing with the rapid adoption of AI. No matter what we’re faced with in the future, we’ll remain steadfast in our commitment to sustainability and will continue to invest, innovate, and obsess over our progress each year, with the same intensity and focus that has defined Amazon from Day One.
The progress demonstrated in this report is the result of the years of work by thousands of Amazonians who have never stopped asking “Why?” to find better and more sustainable solutions. This questioning mindset has uncovered innovative ways to reduce waste, cut emissions, and improve efficiency. I’m confident our habit of asking tough questions will lead to continued breakthrough solutions for decades to come. Thank you to everyone—our teams, partners, and customers—who have helped turn these questions into real-world progress.
With gratitude,
Kara Hurst
Chief Sustainability Officer
Amazon.com, Inc.
Read our 2024 Sustainability Report in full.