AWS re:Invent 2024 Highlighted The Intersection Between AI And Sustainability

AWS re:Invent 2024 Highlighted The Intersection Between AI And Sustainability

At the 2024 AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, AWS’s commitment to AI came across loud and clear, with over 50 announcements related to a wide variety of topics such as incorporating additional safeguards, optimizing storage and developing new foundation models for generative AI tasks. Throughout the conference, customers from a variety of industries spoke about the benefits they have seen from leveraging AI with AWS, with time savings being a key trend. AWS’s focus on sustainability was also woven into discussions throughout the event, showing that the organization is:

• Emphasizing innovations in data centre infrastructure to improve energy efficiency.
  Due to the huge energy demands associated with AI, AWS has been adapting its data centres to make them as energy-efficient as possible. In addition to integrating fossil-free steel, AWS has been incorporating innovations such as liquid cooling and more energy-efficient rack design into its data centres, as well as running some of its backup generators on renewable diesel. During re:Invent, AWS announced that its global Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) – which measures how efficiently a data centre uses energy – was 1.15 for 2023, only slightly higher than a ‘perfect’ PUE of 1; with its planned improvements, AWS is aiming to lower its PUE to 1.08.
  
  
• Maintaining a strong commitment to carbon-free energy and circularity.
  As the use of AI increases energy needs, AWS has committed to leveraging additional forms of carbon-free energy, such as through construction of small modular reactors (SMRs). While AWS’s aim to incorporate nuclear energy into its carbon-free energy mix was evident, what was less clear is how AWS is planning to overcome the obstacles of SMRs, such as disposing of spent nuclear waste or dealing with potential delays or cost overruns in construction. Additionally, AWS highlighted further enhancements to its circular economy strategy, which rests on three core pillars: Design Better, Operate Longer and Recover More.
  
  
• Continuing to help customers build sustainability tools.
  At the Sustainability Showcase, AWS highlighted its Sustainability Data Fabric framework, which customers can use to build tools to address sustainability-specific use cases, like supporting ESG reporting and improving circularity in municipalities. Some customers provided examples of how they are leveraging AWS to advance their sustainability initiatives. For instance, Cargill Ocean Transportation discussed how it built its own solution, Jarvis, to optimize carbon emissions associated with ocean transportation. Meanwhile, Nasdaq spoke about how it developed a serverless AI-powered ESG solution called Nasdaq Sustainable Lens on Amazon Bedrock and AWS Lambda.
  
  
• Improving access and education for underrepresented communities.
  AWS has demonstrated a commitment to education through its AI & ML Scholarship programme and its partnership with Rocket Learning to improve childhood education in India. During re:Invent, some of these achievements were highlighted during a keynote presented by Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of AI at AWS. The tech giant also announced that it is committing up to $100 million in cloud technology and technical resources to help certain learning organizations increase access as part of its AWS Education Equity Initiative.

During re:Invent, it also became clear that many firms are working to expand AI use from pilot projects to enterprise-wide applications. We will continue to watch how AWS customers leverage these technologies to drive new sustainability innovations.