In the second of our set of three Q&As with Roldan, we hear about how heat recycled from Amazon data centres is being used to heat buildings in Tallaght, South Dublin and the company’s ambitious carbon-cutting pledges.
How does AWS assist with cutting carbon emissions for businesses?
Customers are using AWS to make progress on their own sustainability goals because it’s far more energy efficient – greener in the cloud – to host compute workloads on AWS than on one’s own on-premises data centre. According to a report by 451 Research, moving from on-premises to AWS can reduce a company’s IT carbon emissions by 88%. AWS’s infrastructure was also found to be 3.6 times more energy efficient than the traditional alternative.
Our scale allows us to achieve much higher resource utilisation and energy efficiency than the typical on-premises data centre, and AWS’s Global Infrastructure is built on Amazon’s own custom hardware – purpose-built and optimised for workloads run by AWS customers.
We focus on energy efficiency and continuous innovation in our data centres to reduce energy usage and increase operational excellence.
For example we’re innovating to preserve water in our Irish data centres, by using direct evaporative cooling systems, which predominately utilise outside air to cool our servers. This means that for more than 95% of the year we use no water to cool our data centres in Ireland. For the few hot days Ireland does see, we use a minimal amount of water to cool the air that removes heat from our servers – the equivalent to the yearly water usage of just eight average Irish households.
Other clean energy investments include the new Tallaght District Heating Scheme near Dublin, Ireland.
