Amazon has expanded Germany's largest-ever power purchase agreement (PPA), signed in June, and announced four additional deals to buy electricity from wind farms in Sweden, as the e-commerce giant and other electricity-intensive hyperscalers move to meet their rising AI computing and data center demand with carbon-free power. The agreements extend a procurement drive that has made Amazon one of the world's largest corporate buyers of renewable energy and supports its commitments to power its operations with 100% renewable energy and reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

On Friday, Amazon highlighted the signing of a PPA to purchase 600 megawatts (MW) of carbon-free electricity from the Gennaker offshore wind farm in the German Baltic Sea. By agreeing to buy this energy, Amazon will give developer Skyborn Renewables the financial certainty needed to move forward with construction of the project.

The Gennaker wind farm will be located off the coast of northeastern Germany and, once operational, is expected to generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of more than one million German households annually, Amazon said.

In addition, Amazon announced four PPAs in Sweden to purchase power from four new wind energy projects in the Scandinavian country. With the new deals, Amazon's total carbon-free energy capacity in Sweden is closing in on 1 gigawatt (GW), equivalent to powering more than 350,000 Swedish households every year.

The four Swedish wind farms are being developed by Eolus AB and OX2 AB, Amazon said in comments on the PPAs emailed to Bloomberg. Taken together, the agreements bring Amazon's investments in the country to a total of nine utility-scale wind energy projects. Sweden's grid, already dominated by hydro and nuclear generation, has drawn heavy interest from corporate clean-power buyers, and rivals such as Microsoft and Google have signed similar long-term renewable contracts across Europe as power availability increasingly shapes where new data centers are built.

"The world needs more energy, and it needs that energy to be carbon-free, reliable, and affordable for everyone," said Gulfem Toygar, country manager for Amazon Sweden. "Our wind energy investments in Sweden are part of how we're helping to bring more carbon-free energy to the grid."

Amazon and other giant hyperscalers are looking for carbon-free power – where available – to supply their soaring electricity demand. Last year, electricity demand from data centers jumped by 17%, while demand from AI-focused data centers surged even faster, soaring by 50%, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a report in April. These AI-driven surges in power demand vastly outpaced the 3% growth in global electricity demand. In that report, the IEA also projected that global electricity consumption from data centers will more than double by 2030. Corporate PPAs like Amazon's have become an increasingly important financing route for new European wind and solar projects as governments have scaled back direct subsidy schemes.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com