Amazon plans carbon-neutral Canadian AWS region

Amazon has announced it will be creating a Canadian AWS region and it'll be powered by completely clean, renewable hydro-electric power sources.

AWS's Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post that the datacentre will be opening in Montreal, Quebec, allowing Canadian customers to run their workloads and store their data locally.

"Today’s announcement means that our global infrastructure now comprises 32 Availability Zones across 12 geographic regions worldwide, with another 5 AWS regions (and 11 Availability Zones) in Canada, China, India, Ohio, and the United Kingdom coming online throughout the next year," Barr wrote.

"As always, we are looking forward to serving new and existing Canadian customers and to working with partners in the area. Of course, the new region will also be open to existing AWS customers who would like to process and store data in Canada."

The news about Amazon's newest datacentre will please environmental campaigners, who last year insisted the company should be using 100 per cent renewable energy sources by 2020.

Green America has been campaigning for the cloud giant to switch to cleaner energy via a petition, which claims the company’s servers burn through enough energy to keep 600,000 homes powered each year.

“Unlike Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, Amazon has disclosed virtually no information about its energy use and its impacts on the climate,” the group said.

“While Google and Apple have committed to running on 100 per cent renewables and are happy to flaunt their progress to the public, Amazon has done little more than state a goal of moving to renewables, with no plan or timeline for doing so.”