MADRID (Reuters) - Online store Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) said it has contracted Spanish utility Iberdrola (MADRID:IBE) to build and manage a wind farm in North Carolina, United States, to power its current and future cloud data centers.
Amazon affiliate Amazon Web Services (AWS) said on Monday the wind farm would be operational by December of next year, putting it on track to surpass a goal for 40 percent its electrical grids to be powered by renewable energy by end-2016.
The 208 megawatt farm, which adds to other recent Amazon renewable projects in Indiana and Virginia, is expected to generate approximately 670,000 megawatt hours of wind energy a year, enough to power more than 61,000 U.S. homes, it said.
Amazon was singled out in a Greenpeace report last year as lagging behind technology peers such as Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) in adopting renewable energy sources to power Web services.
Data centers are at the heart of the fast-growing Internet industry, storing consumers' email and personal data and delivering multimedia offerings. A large one requires energy capacity of as much as 80 megawatts, according to Greenpeace.