Amazon made a sweeping climate promise in 2019. Seven years later, the company has become the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy — and has never once told shareholders what that strategy costs them. The National Legal and Policy Center demands an answer.
NLPC has prepared for shareholders an executive summary and exempt solicitation report (PDF), which has been circulated to Amazon investors large and small ahead of the company’s May 20, 2026 annual meeting. The proposal — Item 6 on the proxy ballot — asks Amazon’s Board of Directors to publish a report disclosing the incremental costs of The Climate Pledge and what the Board has done, if anything, to reassess it in light of the company’s dramatically transformed energy footprint. Shareholders can vote today, without waiting for the meeting.
When Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge in September 2019, it was spending $12.7 billion a year on capital expenditures. For 2026, management is guiding to approximately $200 billion — a 15-fold increase in less than a decade, driven almost entirely by AI infrastructure. Amazon Web Services, which generates the majority of Amazon’s operating profit, is now locked in a capital-intensive arms race with Microsoft, Google, and Meta in which the cost and reliability of electricity is a direct competitive variable. The Pledge was designed for an e-commerce company. Amazon is now an AI hyperscaler. The math has changed. The disclosure hasn’t.
The full-year 2025 financial results are striking: $716.9 billion in revenue, $77.7 billion in net income, $128.7 billion in AWS revenue. Those are extraordinary numbers — generated by a business whose electricity consumption now rivals that of small nations. Every watt powering those data centers is filtered through a climate commitment that adds cost. No one at Amazon has ever quantified that cost for the people who own the company.
The energy economics are getting worse, not better. The U.S. Department of Energy warned in July 2025 that power outage risk could increase 100-fold by 2030 as data-center demand explodes and conventional generation retires. Renewable interconnection costs have surged — Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that 80% of proposed renewable projects are ultimately withdrawn when upgrade costs become unworkable. Those costs don’t disappear. They get spread across the grid, and ultimately across consumers and shareholders. Amazon absorbs some portion of that friction. Shareholders have no idea how much.
Regulators are catching up to what NLPC has been saying. In September 2025, Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen, leading a coalition of sixteen state attorneys general, launched a formal investigation into Amazon and its Big Tech peers over misleading renewable-energy claims. In January 2026, the Trump administration pressed for policies requiring data-center operators to finance new power generation.
And on March 4, 2026, Amazon’s own leadership showed up at the White House to sign the Ratepayer Protection Pledge — committing to cover the full cost of power generation and grid upgrades for its data centers so those costs aren’t passed to American households. Amazon acknowledged its energy cost obligations to the federal government. It has not acknowledged them to its shareholders.
Amazon’s Board calls NLPC’s proposal “impractical” and says it would produce results “not meaningful to shareholders.” That is not a serious answer from a company with $131.8 billion in capital expenditures and the most sophisticated procurement operation on earth. It is an excuse dressed up as a governance argument.
NLPC previously reached a productive agreement with Apple on a nearly identical proposal — Apple engaged with us constructively, and the result was meaningful disclosure. Amazon has so far chosen a different path.
The annual meeting is May 20. You can vote right now. NLPC urges every Amazon shareholder to read our executive summary and full solicitation report, and to vote FOR Item 6. The Climate Pledge is seven years old. It is time for Amazon to show shareholders the receipts.
(Post references PX14A6G Notice of exempt solicitation)
