Amazon invests in GranBio to scale sustainable aviation fuel technology

Amazon invested in GranBio on June 25 to accelerate a waste-to-sustainable aviation fuel platform with 1 billion gallons a year of cellulosic SAF capacity by 2040.

Amazon puts SAF at less than 0.1% of global aviation fuel use, and Andreas Marschner, Amazon’s vice president of worldwide operations sustainability, said, “Aviation needs lower-carbon fuel, and the supply doesn’t exist at scale yet.” Marschner said GranBio’s technology could turn abundant waste materials into drop-in fuels.

GranBio said its process can convert forestry residues, crop stalks and construction debris such as discarded pallets and plywood into renewable diesel, renewable gasoline and SAF. The fuels are chemically identical to petroleum-based equivalents, while a byproduct generates heat for the facility itself, reducing outside energy demand. Amazon team members visited GranBio’s Thomaston, Georgia, research and development site to watch the wood-waste feedstock being used.

GranBio says its waste-to-fuel technology has been in commercial use for more than a decade and has logged more than 10,000 hours of runtime at plants in the United States and Brazil. GranBio's scale-up plan calls for one commercial-scale plant, then nine more large-scale plants in the United States by 2040, with shuttered pulp and paper mills a target for repurposing. The model uses brownfield industrial sites and existing infrastructure to lower capital costs, while supporting rural manufacturing jobs and forest health.

Amazon co-founded the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance and helped launch the SAFc Registry at COP28 to improve transparency in emissions claims. Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund launched in 2020 with $2 billion in capital, and the company invested in hydrogen-electric startup ZeroAvia that year as well. GranBio has already lined up another U.S. project with Rayonier Advanced Materials, which in July 2025 signed a memorandum of understanding to explore a small-scale commercial SAF facility in Jesup, Georgia, partially financed by a $100 million U.S. Department of Energy grant. DOE project materials list the proposed AVAP Biorefinery as a 1.2 million gallon per year equivalent integrated biomass-to-cellulosic SAF and renewable diesel demonstration plant.