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by Symmetry
2314 days ago
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It all depends on whether you're comparing to a counterfactual or not. If you compare the emissions caused by AWS to those emissions simply not happening then that's a pretty severe source of carbon. If you compare it to companies hosting all that computing themselves then I think it's a pretty clear economic win. If you think that a lot of that would be self-hosted but many of the uses simply wouldn't exist then it's hard to say. For Amazon I really feel like I have no idea about it. With warehouses instead of big box stores you've got a lot less volume being lighted and heated plus a lot of individual cars driving to a central place are replaced by a few large delivery fans then that's the same sort of win you get from people switching to driving the bus. But two-day shipping for rare items that involves flying them across the country is terrible for the environment. So I don't think that I have any clue what the net environmental impact of Amazon has been. |
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