Microsoft said it would be carbon negative by 2030. Then generative ...
Microsoft has spent almost all of 2024 as the world’s most valuable company thanks to how smoothly it has managed to surf the AI tidal wave. Yet the company may have a tough decision ahead: to be the world’s biggest tech company or the cleanest? Its carbon emissions have risen by about 30% over the past four years, according to a sustainability report published by the company this week. That flies in the face of an ambitious pledge Microsoft made in 2020 to be carbon negative by 2030. The bulk of the rise in emissions came from Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing division, which over the past decade has become its cash cow.
Data Centers and Carbon Emissions
The data centres that power cloud computing have always guzzled electricity and water, used to power and cool racks of CPUs. Generative AI requires dramatically more electricity, pushing carbon emissions up if that extra grunt isn't sourced from renewables. Microsoft is building out data centres around the world, including nine new ones in Australia.
Microsoft's Carbon Moonshot
“In 2020, we unveiled what we called our carbon moonshot,” Microsoft president Brad Smith told Bloomberg in a surprisingly frank interview. “That was before the explosion in artificial intelligence… in many ways the moon is five times as far away as it was in 2020.”
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