It's remarkable to me that in the original article and in all these comments so far, there's no mention of energy use by AWS.
AWS is market leader in public cloud, which is probably the fastest growing class of energy consumer. Already overtaking traditional industrial energy consumers such as steel.
Assuming this market trend will continue, what can AWS realistically do to mitigate their impact?
AWS, like google and like Azure and every other cloud provider already does everything they can to minimize energy consumption because it is in their economic interest to do so.
In fact I would think the best thing industry can do to reduce energy consumption is to move their data to a cloud provider. It takes far less energy to cool one large room with servers from a dozen companies than it does to cool a dozen server rooms with private on-prem servers.
This all seems correct, but insufficiently proactive, at least not enough to satisfy activists.
For instance, though it may not currently be economic, how about pre-cooling using renewable energy. Locating data centers next to hydro / geothermal sources? Larger UPS? Load balancing across DCs with available renewables? Other mitigations to get ahead of the issue?
AWS is market leader in public cloud, which is probably the fastest growing class of energy consumer. Already overtaking traditional industrial energy consumers such as steel.
Assuming this market trend will continue, what can AWS realistically do to mitigate their impact?