A new study commissioned by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and completed by Accenture shows that an effective way to minimise the environmental footprint of leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) is by moving IT workloads from on-premises infrastructure to AWS cloud data centres in India and around the globe. Accenture estimates that AWS’s global infrastructure is up to 4.1 times more efficient than on-premises. For Indian organisations, the total potential carbon reduction opportunity for AI workloads optimised on AWS is up to 99% compared to on-premises data centres.
The research states that simply utilising AWS data centres for compute-heavy, or AI, workloads in India yields a 98% reduction in carbon emissions compared to on-premises data centres. This is credited to AWS’s utilisation of more efficient hardware (32%), improvements in power and cooling efficiency (35%), and additional carbon-free energy procurement (31%). Further optimising on AWS by leveraging purpose-built silicon can increase the total carbon reduction potential of AI workloads to up to 99% for Indian organisations that migrate to and optimise on AWS.
Improving energy efficiency across AWS infrastructure
Through innovations in engineering—from electrical distribution to cooling techniques, AWS’s infrastructure is able to operate closer to peak energy efficiency. AWS optimises resource utilisation to minimise idle capacity, and continuously improves the efficiency of its infrastructure. For example, AWS removed the large central Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) from its data centre design to instead use small battery packs and custom power supplies that AWS integrates into every rack, which has improved power efficiency and has further increased availability.