Amazon Admits It Doesn't Know How to Hit Net Zero by 2040

Amazon, the company behind one of the world's largest corporate climate commitments, does not know how it will achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

"We are still striving towards that target," Kara Hurst, Amazon's chief sustainability officer, said Tuesday at an Axios event. "I'm not going to sit here and say, 'We know all the ways that we're going to do this.'"

The admission lands at an uncomfortable moment for corporate climate leadership. Amazon posted revenue of $717 billion last year, up 12% — roughly the size of Ireland's entire economy. If a company with those resources cannot map a path to decarbonization, the prospects for everyone else look thin.

Hurst framed the challenge as shared rather than corporate alone. "This isn't a question of companies versus governments," she told TechCrunch in a written reply to questions after the event. "Tackling climate change at the scale it demands takes both, and it takes them working together." She added: "Where we can lead, we do."

What Amazon has actually done

The company's record is not empty. Hurst noted that Amazon has been "one of the largest purchasers of clean energy in the world for the last several years running," with 42 gigawatts of capacity in its portfolio.

She also said Amazon has cut its carbon intensity — the pollution generated per dollar of revenue. That claim depends on the baseline. Last year, carbon intensity rose compared with 2024, though it remained below 2022 levels.

The structural problem is scale. Amazon's emissions span nearly every sector of the economy: aviation, AI, agriculture, construction. Meeting the 2040 target requires suppliers in every one of those sectors to decarbonize too. "This is not something we can do alone," Hurst said at the Axios event.

Amazon insists its commitment stands regardless. "We hold ourselves accountable to The Climate Pledge goal of net-zero carbon by 2040. That commitment hasn't changed," Hurst told TechCrunch.

The natural gas problem

The company has also made choices that undercut its own leadership. An investigation earlier this year revealed Amazon's plans to build a 7.65 gigawatt natural gas power plant to feed an AI data center campus. The project's 35 turbines could release up to 33 million tons of carbon dioxide annually — which would make it the largest single source of that pollution in the United States.

The contradiction is straightforward. Amazon operates the world's largest cloud service, and AI demand is a revenue driver the company will not pass up. With few exceptions, companies prioritize growth over climate commitments, and Amazon is no exception.

The episode also punctures a core assumption in climate tech: that as clean power gets cheaper, markets will cut emissions on their own. There have been success stories, but the AI buildout has exposed the limits of that logic. Even Amazon — a leader in clean energy procurement — bet big on natural gas.

In doing so, the company effectively signaled that climate change is a problem for future generations of executives to solve. As UN Secretary General António Guterres has pointed out, power has shifted from governments to a few corporations. Amazon's own accounting suggests that where power goes, responsibility follows — whether or not anyone has a plan for it.