Moving Australia's AI workloads to the cloud can reduce carbon emissions by 94%, AWS claims

A new study commissioned by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and conducted by consultancy Accenture suggests that migrating compute-heavy workloads, including AI tasks, from on-premises data centres to AWS cloud in Australia can reduce carbon emissions by up to 94 per cent.

The research, which used the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) standard, compared identical workloads in simulated on-premises data centres to those run on AWS.

The substantial reduction in emissions is attributed to AWS's more efficient hardware (24 per cent), improved power and cooling efficiency (31 per cent), and additional carbon-free energy procurement (39 per cent).

Furthermore, the study found that optimising these workloads on AWS by using purpose-built silicon could increase the total carbon reduction potential to as much as 99 per cent.

"Our research shows by leveraging AWS's focus on efficiency across hardware, cooling, carbon-free energy, purpose-built silicon, and optimised storage, organisations can significantly reduce the carbon footprint of their AI and machine learning workloads," Sanjay Podder, global lead for technology, sustainability, and innovation at Accenture, said.

AWS has been investing in energy-efficient innovations, including the development of purpose-built silicon like the AWS Inferentia chip.

The company claims its Inferentia2 machine learning inference chip provides up to 50 per cent more performance per watt and can reduce costs by up to 50 per cent against comparable instances.

The cloud provider has also focused on optimising its infrastructure for energy efficiency, implementing innovative cooling techniques and integrating liquid cooling capabilities for powerful AI chipsets.

In line with Amazon's commitment to achieving net-zero carbon emissions across all operations by 2040, AWS is rapidly transitioning its global infrastructure to match electricity use with 100 per cent carbon-free energy.

In Australia, Amazon has invested in seven renewable energy projects, which are estimated to generate more than 1,000 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of clean power once operational, to the tune of A$467 million.

These projects include two operational solar farms in Suntop and Gunnedah in New South Wales, a wind farm in Hawkesdale, Victoria, a solar project in Wandoan, Queensland, and three rooftop solar projects on Amazon facilities in Melbourne and Sydney, AWS said.

An estimated 85 per cent of global IT spend by organisations still remains on-premises, a sizeable opportunity that AWS is now targeting by holding out the carrot of carbon reductions to boost sustainability for Australian businesses.