For years, Big Tech has been a vocal advocate of powering their data centers with renewable energy, while the multi-billionaire founders of companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook have teamed up to invest in new technologies for cheaper energy in an emission-free future. Amazon has said in the past that it remains committed to achieving 100-percent renewable energy usage for its global infrastructure. Yet, in a somewhat ironic move, Amazon has been increasingly courting Big Oil, pitching its cloud services to the oil and gas industry, to help oil and gas companies optimize production, reduce time to first oil, and improve profitability. For Amazon Web Services (AWS), the pitch to oil and gas is also about profitability, and is business as usual, despite the company’s pledged support for renewable energy. Two years ago, Amazon launched a concerted effort to book oil and gas industry clients, according to internal documents […]