Amazon admits it doesn't yet know how it'll hit net-zero by 2040

Amazon’s chief sustainability officer, Kara Hurst, said Tuesday at an Axios event that the company doesn’t know how it will achieve its goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. “We are still striving towards that target,” she said, adding that she is “not going to sit here and say, ‘We know all the ways that we’re going to do this.’”

Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world, with last year’s revenue up 12% to $717 billion — roughly the size of Ireland’s economy. As UN Secretary General António Guterres has pointed out, power has shifted from governments to a handful of corporations like it, raising the question of how much climate responsibility Amazon itself should bear. Hurst told TechCrunch in a written reply that tackling climate change “takes both” companies and governments “working together,” adding, “Where we can lead, we do.”

Amazon has not been standing still: Hurst said the company has been “one of the largest purchasers of clean energy in the world for the last several years running,” with 42 gigawatts in its portfolio, and that it has reduced its carbon intensity — pollution generated per dollar of revenue — though that claim depends on the time frame, since intensity rose last year compared with 2024 even as it stayed below its 2022 level. Amazon’s emissions are spread across nearly every sector of the economy, from aviation and AI to agriculture and construction, and the company says it needs suppliers across those sectors to hit its target. It still holds itself accountable to The Climate Pledge’s 2040 net-zero goal, Hurst said, adding that the commitment “hasn’t changed.”

But Amazon has also made choices that cut against that leadership case. Earlier this year, an investigation revealed the company’s plans to build a 7.65-gigawatt natural gas power plant to power an AI data center campus — a project whose 35 turbines could release up to 33 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, making it the largest single source of that pollution in the U.S.

Why it matters

Amazon runs the world’s largest cloud service, and AI has become a revenue driver it isn’t willing to pass up — even when that means betting on natural gas to power it, undercutting the market’s hope that cheaper clean energy alone would be enough to bend corporate emissions down.