APAC organisations can cut carbon emissions with AWS

Organisations in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region can significantly reduce carbon emissions by moving workloads from on-premise datacentres to Amazon Web Services (AWS), a study by Accenture has found.

In a report on the findings of the study commissioned by AWS, Accenture attributed the lower carbon emissions of AWS services to the design of AWS’s infrastructure, which optimises energy usage through purpose-built chips and carbon-free energy sources.

AWS also achieves lower embodied emissions per unit of computing power or storage by consolidating workloads and individual customers onto shared, highly utilised infrastructure, it added.

Accenture used proprietary tools and models to estimate potential carbon emissions from on-premise versus cloud applications in selected use cases, focusing on two types of workloads: storage-heavy and compute-heavy.

For storage-heavy workloads, such as network attached storage (NAS), APAC organisations can expect to reduce carbon emissions by up to 73% in lift-and-shift migrations and a further 47% if they leverage a cloud-native architecture and AWS’s purpose-built silicon.

Accenture noted that the lower carbon emissions from running storage-heavy workloads on AWS stem from optimising the use of inactive storage volumes and reducing the size (in terms of throughput) of the file system storing secondary data copies.

For compute-intensive workloads, such as LayoutLM, a language model developed by Microsoft for document processing, APAC organisations can expect to lower carbon emissions by up to 87% through non-IT power and cooling efficiencies, hardware efficiencies and additional carbon-free energy procured by AWS.

The reductions in carbon emissions from moving workloads from on-premise datacentres to AWS differ across the region, with Japan yielding a 98% reduction for compute-heavy workloads compared to 72% in South Korea and 65% in Singapore.

Jenna Leiner, AWS’s sustainability lead in APAC, noted that the maturity of sustainability practices of organisations operating on-premise datacentres “wildly varies” across the region, whereas sustainability is the basis on which AWS designs its datacentres.

“That means that energy efficiency is at the core, and we roll that out no matter where we are, whether it’s in APAC or globally, to make sure that every time we are providing services to our customers, it has that energy efficiency and it’s cool,” she said.

The APAC region, however, is behind markets in Europe where sustainability is top of mind in technology procurement decisions, Leiner said, noting that sustainability is “more relevant” in markets like Australia and Singapore.

“That is reflected in both their governments shining a light on the datacentre industry and trying to drive best practices in energy efficiency,” she said. “Also, from a regulatory perspective, everyone is going to have to start thinking about Scope 3 [indirect and supply chain] emissions and be thoughtful, down to the individual team and department level.

“We need to work hand in hand with our customers to help them understand how they can continue to optimise on AWS – especially when they’re looking to run compute-heavy workloads around AI, that they understand all the levers within their control to reduce energy use and eliminate waste when they’re operating on our cloud,” she added.

Leiner said AWS customers can use the Customer Carbon Footprint Tracking Tool to get an estimate of their carbon emissions associated with the use of AWS services, along with a calculator to determine potential emission reductions by moving to AWS.

For now, the tool does not provide Scope 3 data, which can be challenging for hyperscalers to ascertain accurately without broader adoption of Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) documents by their suppliers.

In its 2023 sustainability report released earlier this month, Amazon reported a 7% increase in emissions from its direct operations (Scope 1), an 11% reduction in emissions from electricity (Scope 2) and a 5% decrease in Scope 3 emissions.

While the report highlighted AWS’s contributions to Amazon’s overall sustainability efforts last year, it does not provide a breakdown of the cloud provider’s greenhouse gas emissions, which one IT sustainability expert has claimed is of limited value to IT buyers.