Amazon’s climate pollution is still rising. The company reports that its absolute greenhouse-gas emissions increased 16% from 2024 to 2025, while supply-chain emissions rose 20%. At the same time, Amazon says its carbon intensity has fallen 38% since 2019, emissions per shipped unit have declined 39%, and revenue has grown 156%.
Those claims are not necessarily contradictory. They measure different things. Amazon is becoming more efficient per dollar of revenue, package, and unit of computing—but its business is expanding faster than those efficiency gains can offset. For customers, investors, policymakers, and AWS users, the important question is therefore not simply whether Amazon is “green.” It is whether absolute emissions begin falling soon enough to support its 2040 net-zero pledge.
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The latest numbers show a real contradiction
According to Amazon’s 2025 Sustainability Report, the company’s total reported carbon footprint increased 16% year over year. Its reported carbon intensity also increased 3% from 2024, although intensity was 38% lower than in 2019.
Amazon reports that revenue increased 156% between 2019 and 2025. That allows the company to argue that emissions have grown more slowly than the business. It is a meaningful efficiency improvement, but it does not change the climate significance of emitting more greenhouse gases in total.
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| Measure | Amazon’s reported result | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Absolute emissions | Up 16% from 2024 to 2025 | Total pollution attributed to the company increased |
| Carbon intensity | Up 3% year over year; down 38% since 2019 | Emissions per business or revenue measure |
| Emissions per shipped unit | Down 7% from 2024; down 39% since 2019 | Shows efficiency in retail and delivery operations |
| Supply-chain emissions | Up 20% in 2025; 76% of the reported footprint | Most pollution occurs beyond Amazon’s directly operated facilities |
“Carbon footprint,” “energy use,” “carbon intensity,” and “emissions per package” are not interchangeable. A lower figure for one metric does not prove that the total footprint is shrinking.
Why Amazon’s emissions are increasing
AWS, AI, and data centers
Cloud computing is now central to Amazon’s climate story. Amazon says AWS revenue increased 20% in 2025 and that it added more data-center capacity than any other company globally that year. Its data centers reported a global average power usage effectiveness, or PUE, of 1.14. A PUE of 1.0 would mean that all electricity went directly to computing equipment rather than cooling and other overhead.
Better PUE can reduce emissions for each computing task. But if demand for cloud services and AI grows much faster, total electricity consumption and total emissions can still rise. This is the scale or rebound problem: efficiency makes more computing economically practical, which can increase overall use.
Amazon’s report anticipates near-term emissions increases as the company expands operations while pursuing longer-term reductions. The report does not establish that AI alone caused the 2025 increase, so it is more accurate to describe AI and data-center expansion as important reported drivers rather than assign them a precise share of the increase.
Construction and embodied carbon
Building data centers creates emissions before a server performs any computation. Amazon includes construction and other infrastructure-related emissions in its supply-chain accounting. These can include cement, steel, hardware manufacturing, capital equipment, and transportation.
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That matters because a focus on renewable electricity or electric delivery vans captures only part of the climate impact. A new facility can have substantial embodied carbon even if its eventual electricity use is matched with renewable-energy purchases.
Delivery and logistics
Amazon reports that its global electric delivery fleet grew from 31,400 vehicles in 2024 to more than 52,700 in 2025. Those vehicles delivered 2.4 billion packages in 2025, and Amazon retains a goal of having at least 100,000 electric delivery vans by 2030. See Amazon’s summary of the 2025 report.
This is substantial operational progress, but it does not prove that transportation emissions are falling overall. Amazon’s delivery network also includes conventional vehicles and third-party carriers. The relevant questions are how quickly electric vehicles are replacing fossil-fuel vehicles, how much of the network remains dependent on them, and how consistently third-party transportation is measured across countries.
Electrification also shifts some energy demand from fuel tanks to the electricity grid, while vehicle manufacturing creates its own emissions. EVs can still deliver major lifecycle benefits, but their rollout should not be treated as equivalent to eliminating transportation pollution.
Rapid business growth
Amazon’s retail network, warehouses, cloud services, AI infrastructure, buildings, hardware, and logistics operations are all expanding. Efficiency gains can reduce the emissions associated with each package or dollar while growth adds more packages, facilities, servers, and suppliers.
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That is why both of the following can be true:
- Amazon emits less per shipped unit than it did in 2019.
- Amazon’s total climate footprint is larger than it was before.
What Amazon means by “100% renewable energy”
Amazon says it matched 100% of the electricity consumed by its global operations with renewable-energy sources in 2025, marking the third consecutive year of that claim. This is an important distinction: Amazon says its electricity use was matched with renewable energy, not that every facility was physically powered by renewable electricity every hour.
Annual matching can involve renewable-energy contracts, projects, or certificates. It does not necessarily mean that a data center consumed newly generated wind or solar power at the precise time and location of its electricity use. Nor does it mean Amazon has no electricity-related emissions or that its full corporate carbon footprint is zero.
Readers evaluating the claim should examine Amazon’s reporting and renewable-energy methodologies through its sustainability reporting center. Important distinctions include:
- Annual versus hourly matching: A yearly balance can coexist with fossil-fuel generation during many hours.
- Market-based versus location-based accounting: These approaches can produce different Scope 2 results.
- Additionality: A certificate or contract does not always demonstrate that new clean generation was built because of the company’s consumption.
- Locality: Renewable generation in one region may not directly supply a data center operating on another grid.
It would be inaccurate to call the renewable-energy claim fraudulent solely because total emissions rose. The fair criticism is narrower: a headline annual-matching figure can obscure continued growth in total emissions and ongoing fossil-fuel generation in the wider electricity system.
Why supply-chain emissions are the biggest issue
Amazon says supply-chain emissions represented 76% of its reported footprint in 2025 and increased 20% during the year. This category includes emissions connected with construction, third-party transportation, Amazon-branded products, hardware, and other purchased goods and services.
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These are largely Scope 3 emissions. Unlike fuel burned in an Amazon-owned facility, they are often estimated using supplier information, emissions factors, allocation methods, and assumptions about outsourced activity. That makes them harder to measure and control, but not irrelevant.
Amazon reports that 62% of its top suppliers, representing 70% of its supply-chain emissions, had credible decarbonization plans at the end of 2025. A plan is a progress indicator; it is not evidence that the underlying emissions have already declined. The key test is whether suppliers produce verified reductions over time and whether Amazon changes purchasing requirements, contracts, and product design enough to make those reductions durable.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Amazon’s Climate Pledge
Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge in 2019 and committed to reaching net-zero carbon emissions across its operations by 2040—10 years ahead of the commonly cited 2050 Paris Agreement timeline.
A credible assessment of that pledge requires more than checking whether Amazon purchased renewable energy in a particular year. It should examine:
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- Whether Scope 1, Scope 2, and relevant Scope 3 categories are comprehensively included.
- Whether interim reductions for 2030 and later years are specific and measurable.
- Whether supplier and third-party logistics emissions are actually falling.
- How much of the eventual target depends on direct reductions versus offsets or carbon removals.
- Whether data-center and AI growth can be supplied with genuinely additional, low-carbon electricity.
Amazon’s approach to science-based targets provides additional context on its climate planning. But Amazon’s own sustainability report remains a company disclosure, not independent verification of every reported result.
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The historical context: what changed since the 2022 story?
The original “Amazon’s climate pollution is getting worse” story was published on August 1, 2022, using Amazon’s 2021 data. At that time, Amazon reported that its carbon footprint had increased 18% year over year and 40% from 2019, reaching approximately 71.54 million metric tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent.
Contemporary coverage, including The Verge and CNBC, connected part of that increase with the pandemic-era online-shopping surge.
The 2025 figures show that the issue was not simply a temporary pandemic distortion. Amazon reports large efficiency gains since 2019, but absolute emissions are still rising as the company expands. The current story is therefore more complicated than the 2022 headline: Amazon is improving some operating metrics while failing, so far, to reduce its total reported footprint.
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No outside conclusion can be made from a single annual increase, and “off track” requires a defined benchmark. But the current evidence does not show that Amazon has overcome the central problem of its pledge: absolute emissions must eventually fall, not merely grow more slowly than revenue.
The strongest case for Amazon is that its business has expanded dramatically while intensity and emissions per shipped unit have fallen. Renewable-energy procurement, more efficient data centers, electric delivery vehicles, supplier programs, and investments in wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, and storage could all help reduce future emissions.
The strongest case against declaring success is that total emissions rose 16% in 2025, supply-chain emissions rose 20%, and data-center and AI expansion may accelerate electricity and construction demand. A supplier decarbonization plan is not a reduction. A lower PUE does not cap total electricity consumption. Annual renewable matching does not guarantee hourly, local, additional clean power. And carbon removals cannot indefinitely substitute for cutting emissions at the source.
A credible 2040 pathway should show a visibly declining absolute-emissions curve, transparent interim milestones, comprehensive supply-chain accounting, and evidence that growth in computing and logistics is being separated from fossil-fuel use.
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- Absolute emissions, not just intensity or emissions per package.
- AWS electricity demand, AI infrastructure growth, and new data-center construction.
- The share of suppliers with measured emissions reductions rather than only published plans.
- Whether renewable-energy procurement is local, additional, and increasingly time-matched.
- Growth in offsets and carbon removals, and what portion of the target they are expected to cover.
- Progress from more than 52,700 electric delivery vans toward at least 100,000 by 2030.
- Changes to accounting boundaries or methodology that could affect year-over-year comparisons.
For investors and customers, the practical lesson is simple: do not treat a single favorable climate metric as a complete verdict. Amazon’s progress is real, but so is the increase in its total pollution.
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