Microsoft pledged to be carbon-negative by 2030 — four years in, its own 2024 report disclosed emissions are 29.1% above the baseline they promised to cut from
"Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030. By 2050 Microsoft will remove from the environment all the carbon the company has emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since it was founded in 1975."
Our overall emissions increased by 29.1 percent from our 2020 baseline. As we have grown our cloud business, building data centers to deliver AI services has resulted in higher Scope 3 emissions associated with the construction of those data centers, the embodied carbon in building materials, and hardware components such as semiconductors, servers, and racks. — Microsoft 2024 Environmental Sustainability Report, May 2024. source ↗
In January 2020 Microsoft's President Brad Smith and CEO Satya Nadella announced the carbon-negative-by-2030 pledge, framing it as the most ambitious in the technology industry. The trajectory the pledge required was a steady decline from 2020 toward zero, then negative. Microsoft's own 2024 Environmental Sustainability Report — the company's official measurement — disclosed that emissions are 29.1 percent ABOVE that 2020 baseline, with the report explicitly attributing the increase to data centers built to deliver AI services. The disclosure makes the 2030 target mathematically unreachable on the originally-stated path: with six years remaining and emissions a third higher than the start line, the implied compound annual decline required to land at zero now exceeds 6 percent per year, with negative emissions on top of that — while the AI capex commitments driving the increase continue to grow.
Baseline: 2024 US suburban household consumption: 10,500 kWh electricity / 109,500 gal water / 16 tonnes CO2e per year. · Methodology · How this is verified