Amazon has developed a new networking design called RNG that it says boosts data center efficiency by 33% and cuts energy use by 40%. The company shared the numbers in a recent technical brief, though it hasn't detailed when or where the design will be deployed across its own facilities.
The efficiency numbers
The 33% efficiency gain is a big jump for data centers, where even single-percentage improvements usually take months of tuning. Amazon's RNG design — the acronym hasn't been explained publicly — tackles the way data flows between servers, reducing the overhead that normally eats up computing cycles.
Companies like Google and Microsoft have their own custom networking setups, but Amazon's claim of a one-third efficiency improvement is rare in an industry where most gains come in small increments.
Energy impact
The 40% reduction in energy use is tied to the same design. Less wasted computation means less heat, which means less power for cooling. Data centers already account for about 1% of global electricity demand, so a cut of that size from one of the largest operators could have measurable effects if the design spreads.
Amazon hasn't said whether RNG is already running in its cloud regions or if it's still in prototype phase. The company also didn't mention any plans to license the design to other data center operators, which would amplify the energy savings beyond its own infrastructure.
The next step will be seeing whether Amazon rolls RNG out to its fleet of data centers — and whether the promised numbers hold up at scale.
