Microsoft’s obsession with AI is compromising its climate ambitions

Microsoft is producing much more planet-warming pollution now than when it created bold weather oath in 2020. Its greenhouse gas emissions were actually about 30% higher in fiscal 2023, showing how difficult it can be for the company to meet climate goals as it simultaneously races to be a leader in AI.

In 2020, Microsoft set a goal of becoming carbon negative by the end of the decade. To translate the jargon, it committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by more than half and then capturing more carbon dioxide emissions than it would otherwise produce. It was an audacious commitment to make at the time, considering carbon capture technologies were barely emerging. The company would also have to encourage the deployment of much more renewable energy in the electrical networks where it operates.

“In 2020, we unveiled what we call our carbon moonshot. This was before the explosion of artificial intelligence,” Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a statement. interview with Bloomberg. “So in many ways the Moon is five times further away than it was in 2020, if we just think about our own prediction for the expansion of AI and its electrical needs.”

Diving into the data from Microsoft’s sustainability report, you can see how far it went in the wrong direction. It pumped out 15.357 million metric tons of carbon dioxide during the last fiscal year, comparable to the annual carbon pollution of Haiti or Brunei.

Data centers used to train AI consume even more energy than traditional data centers, which already consume a lot of electricity to run servers and cooling systems to prevent overheating. And Microsoft has plans to build many more of these data centers now that it’s all about AI. The company planned to spend $50 billion in the last fiscal year to fulfill its AI ambitions – a number it is expected to surpass next year, Bloomberg reports.