Who Owns Amazon Web Services?

Amazon has committed to reaching net-zero carbon across its operations by 2040, a target it calls The Climate Pledge. For AWS specifically, Amazon matched 100% of its electricity consumption with renewable energy purchases in 2023 and maintained that match in 2024, the second consecutive year of 100% renewable energy matching.

AWS has committed to being water positive by 2030, meaning the company intends to return more water to local communities than its data centers consume in direct operations. In 2024, AWS reported a Water Usage Effectiveness ratio of 0.15 liters per kilowatt-hour of IT load, a 17% improvement from 2023. The company reported being approximately 53% of the way toward its water positive target as of 2024.

AWS data centers reported a global Power Usage Effectiveness of 1.15 in 2024, compared to an industry average for enterprise data centers of approximately 1.63, reflecting efficiency gains from AWS's scale and cooling technology investment.

In 2024, Amazon signed agreements for nuclear power sourcing to supply AWS data centers, including a multi-reactor agreement with Constellation Energy and a small modular reactor agreement with X-Energy. These nuclear agreements supplement AWS's existing wind and solar renewable energy portfolio.

No B Corp, Fair Trade, or similar third-party certification applies to cloud infrastructure services. AWS sustainability claims are disclosed through Amazon's annual sustainability report and SEC filings rather than through independent certification bodies.

AWS has not issued product recalls in the traditional sense, as it provides software services rather than physical consumer goods. However, the platform has experienced notable service disruptions and faced regulatory and competitive scrutiny.

Major Outages in US-EAST-1: AWS's US-EAST-1 Region in Northern Virginia has experienced multiple significant outages over the years, with notable disruptions in 2017, 2021, 2023, and 2025. The 2025 outage, caused by a failure in a network load balancer monitoring subsystem, affected services including major websites and applications reliant on AWS infrastructure. The pattern of repeated disruptions in this Region has drawn criticism from enterprise customers and infrastructure analysts regarding single-region concentration risk.

JEDI Contract Dispute (2019-2022): The U.S. Department of Defense awarded a $10 billion cloud contract called JEDI to Microsoft in 2019. Amazon challenged the award, alleging improper political interference in the procurement process, including claims that President Trump had improperly influenced the decision. The dispute was eventually mooted when the DoD cancelled the JEDI contract in 2021 and restructured the program as JWCC, which AWS won a portion of alongside Microsoft and Google.

Market Dominance Scrutiny: AWS's approximately 30% market share in cloud infrastructure has drawn attention from competition regulators in the European Union and United Kingdom, who have examined whether AWS's market position creates barriers for competing providers. No formal enforcement action had been completed against AWS on these grounds as of June 2026.

Cost Complexity Concerns: AWS has faced sustained criticism from enterprise customers regarding the complexity and unpredictability of cloud cost management. AWS's pricing involves hundreds of service-specific rates, data transfer fees, and regional pricing variations. Third-party cloud cost management tools have become a significant software category as a result of this complexity.