1. Adam Selipsky, AWS
Calling sustainability “the issue of our generation,” Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky took the stage this week to deliver an AWS re:Invent keynote speech.
The topics of water, and energy production and consumption, took up a significant portion of Selipsky’s focus. His comments came as the cloud computing sector has raised eyebrows for the excessive use of natural resources required to deliver services.
Selipsky made waves when he announced AWS’ commitment to 100% renewable energy by 2025. He said AWS has already made it 85% of the way there, due in part to the company’s new water-use approach that consumes one-quarter of a liter of water per kilowatt hour. AWS will “return more water to our communities than we use,” Selipsky said. Those efforts will help AWS tackle climate change — “a problem for all of us,” Selipsky said.
Read more highlights from Kelly Teal’s keynote reporting here.
