If Amazon doesn’t know how to eliminate carbon emissions, then who does?

Amazon’s top sustainability executive acknowledged this week that the company does not yet have a complete roadmap to meet its pledge of net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. Kara Hurst told an Axios event that while the company remains committed to the goal, it cannot yet enumerate every step that will get it there.

That uncertainty stands against Amazon’s immense scale: the company posted $717 billion in revenue last year, roughly the size of a mid-sized national economy, and operates across sectors that include aviation, cloud computing, logistics, construction and agriculture. Because its emissions are distributed across many parts of the economy, Amazon says it will need suppliers and partners across those industries to decarbonize alongside it.

Amazon also highlights concrete climate actions. The company reports holding about 42 gigawatts of clean energy in its portfolio and says its longer-term carbon intensity has fallen. However, its intensity metric increased versus 2024. Meanwhile, earlier reporting showed Amazon pursuing a 7.65-gigawatt natural gas power plant to serve an AI data center campus; that project, featuring 35 turbines, could emit as much as 33 million tons of CO2 annually and would be one of the largest single stationary sources of U.S. emissions if built as described.

Hurst framed the challenge as one that requires both corporate and government action, saying large-scale climate progress depends on collaboration. Critics and analysts note a tension between Amazon’s clean-energy purchases and choices that expand fossil-fuel–driven capacity for energy-intensive growth areas like AI, underscoring the difficulty of reconciling near-term business expansion with long-term decarbonization commitments.