Microsoft Corp. may shelve one of the industry's most ambitious clean-energy targets as it tries to remove hurdles that could hold it back in the race to power data centres, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The company is weighing whether to delay — or even abandon altogether — its 2030 target of matching 100 per cent of its hourly electricity use with renewable energy purchases, according to the people, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter.
Within Microsoft, living up to the 100/100/0 target was always seen as a stretch, according to people familiar with the program. The costly and energy-intensive build-out of data centres is affecting views on the feasibility of climate commitments made before the AI era, the people said. Talks inside Microsoft are ongoing and no final decision has been made, they also said.
A spokesperson for Microsoft said the company continues to look for opportunities to maintain an annual matching goal, without commenting on the much tougher hourly commitment.
Shift in Big Tech's Climate Ambitions
Such a retreat would mark a significant shift. Big Tech has long stood out for its public embrace of some unusually ambitious emissions-cutting goals, with Microsoft even pledging to remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it emits. But as companies including Amazon.com Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. try to secure enough energy to meet the demands of artificial intelligence, the appeal of natural gas has been growing.
“In the race to get data centres up and running as soon as possible, clean energy targets are out of the window,” said Alexia Kelly, the former director of net zero and nature at Netflix Inc., who is now the managing director of the carbon policy and markets initiative at High Tide Foundation. Instead, “gas seems to be the fuel of choice.”
Microsoft's 100/100/0 Goal
Announced in 2021, Microsoft's flagship clean-power goal — dubbed 100/100/0 — was meant to match 100 per cent of its electricity consumption, 100 per cent of the time, with zero-carbon energy purchases (all from the same power grids from which it was drawing the energy). The hour-by-hour matching commitment was considerably more ambitious than Microsoft's previous target, which it has already met, of buying enough renewable energy to match its annual electricity consumption.
Microsoft says it's been adding a gigawatt of data centre capacity, enough to power 750,000 homes, every three months. In their latest sustainability reports, Meta, Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Amazon and Microsoft said their carbon emissions went up 64 per cent, 51 per cent, 33 per cent and 23 per cent, respectively, compared with benchmarks predating the first release of ChatGPT in late 2022. Microsoft singled out “growth-related factors such as AI and cloud expansion” as reasons behind the surge in emissions.
The amount of power consumed by United States data centres is likely to more than double to 106 gigawatts in the decade through 2035, with natural gas set to play a key role, according to BloombergNEF. On a global basis, renewables will meet nearly 50 per cent of the growth in data centre electricity demand, though in the U.S. gas will dominate, according to the International Energy Agency.
