Microsoft’s new sustainability report, launched late final week, reveals how a carbon-heavy financial system can weigh on an organization that desires to be carbon gentle.
Since 2020, its carbon emissions are up 23.4%, principally a results of breakneck data center buildout to assist its rising cloud and AI operations. Shopping for sufficient clear electrical energy is definitely the simple half — it’s the amenities themselves which can be laden with carbon-intensive supplies and merchandise, together with metal, concrete, and laptop chips.
“We mirror the challenges the world should overcome to develop and use greener concrete, metal, fuels, and chips,” a Microsoft spokesperson instructed TechCrunch through e mail. “These are the largest drivers of our Scope 3 challenges.”
Scope 3 emissions are these which can be exterior an organization’s direct management, together with uncooked supplies, transportation, and bought items and providers. Emissions in Scope 3 symbolize almost all of Microsoft’s carbon footprint, simply over 97% for fiscal yr 2024, which the 2025 sustainability report covers.
Microsoft’s Scope 3 profile is dominated by capital items and bought items and providers, with the 2 contributing about three-quarters of the corporate’s complete carbon emissions.
The development of knowledge facilities has been the principle driver behind Microsoft’s cussed Scope 3 emissions. The metal used within the buildings comes from a provide chain that depends on blast furnaces heated by fossil fuels, and concrete used within the basis is the product of a chemical response that’s each powered by and a producer of carbon dioxide. Some startups are working to decarbonize each steel and cement, and Microsoft is an investor within the area, but it surely’ll be years earlier than these bets could have a big influence.
Carbon emissions are embodied within the laptop chips inside the information middle, too. Semiconductor lithography relies on chemical compounds which have extraordinarily excessive international warming potential. For instance, hexafluoroethane, which is used to etch options on chips, is a potent greenhouse gasoline, with 1 ton producing as a lot warming as 9,200 tons of carbon dioxide.
Even in inexperienced electrical energy, which is less complicated to search out, hurdles have popped up as information facilities aren’t at all times constructed close to considerable clear vitality sources. Due to that, Microsoft has had a troublesome time discovering close by sources of zero-carbon electrical energy, forcing it to depend on purchases elsewhere. “Our electrical energy consumption has grown quicker than the grids the place we function have decarbonized,” the spokesperson mentioned.
General, Microsoft’s 2024 emissions had been down barely in contrast with 2023, suggesting that the corporate is getting higher at constructing information facilities with decrease local weather impacts. Nonetheless, it has an extended method to go to satisfy its 2030 objective of eradicating extra carbon air pollution that it generates. By its personal forecast, Microsoft should minimize its emissions by greater than half whereas additionally considerably ramping up its carbon elimination efforts.
There are indicators that Microsoft is making some headway on each fronts. It has been one of many main investors in and buyers of solar energy in latest months, and its zero-carbon electrical energy portfolio now stands at 34 gigawatts of capability. Plus, it has not too long ago signed some very large offers that promise to take away tens of millions of metric tons of carbon.
2030 is just some years away, nonetheless, and the corporate’s push into AI and cloud could also be worthwhile — but it surely’s made reaching its sustainability targets that a lot tougher.