Six years ago, Microsoft pledged it would be carbon negative by 2030. It’s a worthy goal, and for several years the company was on track to meeting it.
Then generative AI came along and the world changed. Electric power demand from data centers will more than double between 2025 and 2030, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). “The US economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminum, steel, cement and chemicals,” the agency projects.
All this new electricity generation means much more carbon will be put into the atmosphere, exacerbating climate change.
What does this mean for Microsoft’s pledge to be carbon negative within four years now? Just two months ago, the company claimed it was on track and had recently passed a major milestone in getting there by becoming carbon neutral. Detractors say nothing could be further from the truth — that it’s just smoke and mirrors, and the company has become a serious polluter and engine for accelerated climate change.
Who’s right? To find out, we’ll look at Microsoft’s claims, lay out what its opponents say, and finally, compare the company’s promises to what it’s actually done.
Microsoft’s rosy view
Microsoft claims not just that it’s on track to becoming a carbon-neutral company by 2030, but that 2025 marked an important turning point on the journey. The headline of the company’s blog post about it in February says it all: “A milestone achievement in our journey to carbon negative.”
From just that headline, you’d think the company was boasting it had reduced its carbon emissions drastically. That’s not the case. Microsoft wrote the post in such an oblique way that it’s tough to know just what it’s claiming. Specifically, the company claimed to have met “our aim to match 100% of our annual global electricity consumption with renewable energy.”
That’s a roundabout way of describing carbon offsets — paying other companies to generate renewable energy that don’t release carbon. In that way, Microsoft can say it’s offsetting its own carbon emissions. Eventually, it claims, by using offsets it will accomplish its goal of removing more carbon from the atmosphere than it’s putting into it by 2030.
Is Microsoft greenwashing?
Critics say Microsoft’s carbon emissions are skyrocketing, and carbon offsets are little more than greenwashing. The Stand.earth Research Group, which does investigative research about climate change, warns that a single new recently announced Microsoft AI data center in West Virginia will “unleash a 44% increase in the company’s annual emissions.”
The group also says that when the facility reaches its full generating capacity in 2031, “Microsoft and co-located partners will emit 25.55 million metric tons of CO₂ per year, as much as putting nearly 6 million cars on the road.”
Keep in mind, that’s just a single facility.
A year ago, Sustainability Magazine warned that even though Microsoft had made substantial investments in renewable energy and conservation, the company’s total carbon emissions had increased by more than 24%. Things have only gotten worse since then.
Many environmentalists don’t believe carbon offsets make up for the carbon emissions a company creates — they call all offsets greenwashing. David Keith, who is head of the Climate Systems Engineering initiative at the University of Chicago and lead author of a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), put it bluntly: “I think all this voluntary stuff and companies claiming to be green is basically greenwashing crap.”
The upshot
So who’s right? If Microsoft buys enough offsets by 2030, will the company really be carbon negative?
There’s an easy way to find out — look at what Microsoft President and Vice Chair Brad Smith promised in his 2020 blog post, “Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030.” In the post, he noted that merely buying offsets isn’t enough; Microsoft needs to completely switch to renewable power for the vast majority of its direct energy use, buying offsets only to make up for its much smaller indirect energy use, such as employee travel or the electricity its customers use when using Microsoft products.
Here’s what he promised: “By 2025, we will shift to 100% supply of renewable energy, meaning that we will have power purchase agreements for green energy contracted for 100% of carbon emitting electricity consumed by all our data centers, buildings, and campuses.”
That hasn’t happened.
The company’s carbon emissions from its oil- and gas-powered data centers skyrocketed in the last few years, and they’re getting worse. By the company’s own definition, it is not now carbon neutral, won’t be carbon negative by 2030, and isn’t likely to get there — ever.