Windows Central broke the news this week that Microsoft’s own sustainability report shows the company cannot keep pace with the electricity it is devouring to feed Copilot, Azure, and OpenAI artificial intelligence models. Energy use has exploded 168 percent since 2020, driving a 23.4 percent jump in total greenhouse-gas emissions—the exact opposite direction of the company’s headline pledge to become carbon-negative within by 2030. According to Windows Central:
Microsoft President Brad Smith, who has championed the company’s green pledges, conceded that its 2030 pledges represent a “marathon, not a sprint.”
“As we remain focused on sustained progress towards our 2030 goals, it has become clear that our journey towards being carbon negative is a marathon, not a sprint.” Smith explains, “While our total emissions (Scope 1, 2, and 3) have increased by 23.4% compared to our 2020 baseline due to growth-related factors such as AI and cloud expansion, we are encouraged by the fact that this increase has been modest compared to the 168% increase in energy use and 71% revenue growth that has taken place over the same period.”
For Microsoft to admit that its total emissions have grown, rather than shrank, at the half-way point since it introduced these pledges, isn’t exactly a shining endorsement for the firm’s green credentials. Microsoft and other big tech firms have begun exploring things like nuclear power to offset its energy demands, which produces little to no carbon directly.
Reality check…data-center hunger dwarfs offsets. Even after contracting 19 GW of renewables, buying 22 million tons of carbon-removal credits, and flirting with a refurbished nuclear plant, Microsoft’s emissions are climbing—because every new GPU rack guzzles megawatt-hours around the clock.
Scope 3 emissions are the real killer. Supply-chain carbon emissions rose 26% as Microsoft bought servers, chips, and concrete for hundreds of new facilities. There is no clear pathway to slash those indirect emissions without throttling growth. And policy headwinds are worsening. The recent rollback of U.S. renewable-energy tax credits (the “Big Beautiful Bill”) will make it more, not less, expensive to ink clean-power deals at the scale Microsoft needs.
Microsoft’s own numbers confirm what NLPC has argued for years: you can’t promise carbon nirvana while shoveling ever larger piles of fuel into the AI furnace. Unless the board reins in these contradictory objectives, shareholders face a future of spiraling utility bills, broken climate commitments, and regulatory backlash for greenwashing.
