Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud computing business, is its fastest-growing and most profitable division, but it comes with a lot of upfront infrastructure costs and ongoing expenses, the biggest of which is electricity. Over the past two years, Amazon has almost doubled the size of its physical footprint worldwide, to 254 million square feet, including dozens of new data centers with vast fields of servers running 24/7. In at least two states, it's also negotiated with utilities and politicians to stick other people with the bills, piling untold millions of dollars on top of the estimated $1.2 billion in state and municipal tax incentives the company has received over the past decade.
Other companies, including Google and Tesla, have taken advantage of the power industry's hunger for growth and the relative secrecy that followed its 1990s deregulation in dozens of states. But Amazon stands out for its success in offloading its power costs and also because it dominates America's cloud business, which has gone from nonexistent to using 2 percent of U.S. electricity in about a decade. "Amazon had a huge advantage, because there weren't a lot of other sectors growing in the electricity market," says Neal Elliott, senior director of research at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), a green lobbying group. The company has also ratcheted up the secrecy around who's paying for electricity, says environmental advocate Greenpeace, which calls Amazon the single biggest obstacle to industry transparency.
Originally Posted by Zippyjuan
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