Amazon Web Services will power data centers with wind-farm energy

The latest technology company to announce a renewable energy project: Amazon.

The Seattle company's Amazon Web Services unit has hired an energy company to build a wind farm in North Carolina to help power its data centers.

There's a push to power the growing number of data centers in the country with renewable energy. Google and Facebook have already announced similar projects.

By the end of 2016, the Amazon project is expected to provide energy equivalent to the amount needed to power 61,000 homes. The energy will go into the electrical grid that supplies Amazon Web Services data centers.

Amazon Web Services is the unit of e-commerce powerhouse Amazon that offers business services via remote servers, or the "cloud." AWS said earlier this year that about 25 percent of the power consumed by its global infrastructure was from renewable sources and its goal is for that to reach 40 percent by the end of 2016.

Terms with the energy company with which it is working, Iberdrola Renwables, were undisclosed Monday.