The actual number is most likely lower: AWS has to make some profit, and it's not known for being cheap.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ [2] https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/oregon/
The actual number is most likely lower: AWS has to make some profit, and it's not known for being cheap.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ [2] https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/oregon/
It's not only the amount of energy used for that at the datacenter, it's also summing up all the fractions of power usage per GB of the used fiber connection, the repeaters on this fiber connection, routers, switches, losses in power supplies, energy required for air conditioning the hardware, the phone/cable/mobile infrastructure that also has switches, repeaters, ... until ones own modem, router and computer at the own location that is needing energy to operate.
Ask yourself: How can it be more efficient to stream the same stuff over and over again, wasting CPU cycles on couple of fat machines etc. instead of playing it from a local cache (hard drive, ...). IMHO it cannot be more efficient. It is convenient and it appears to be cheap.
Companies like Amazon may not care about environment, but they care a lot about saving money, and modern computers can handle a surprising amount of connections simultaneously: it's not like those beefy AWS instances are serving just your music.
/s I would bet Bezos and folks can buy fresh air when it comes to this point. But at least we all could watch Game of Thrones when we wanted to.