One of Big Tech's most ambitious climate targets may be on its way out.
Microsoft is reconsidering its 2030 goal to match 100% of its hourly electricity use with renewable energy from the same grid, reports Bloomberg.
The supposed culprit? Artificial intelligence.
Microsoft is adding roughly one gigawatt of data centre capacity every three months and expects to spend $190bn on infrastructure through end of 2025, largely for data centres.
That scale makes the hourly clean-energy standard increasingly hard to justify financially, according to Microsoft.
The company has also held talks with Chevron to fund a natural gas plant in West Texas.
A Microsoft spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company continues to look for opportunities to maintain an annual matching goal – notably declining to defend the tougher hourly commitment.
For impact investors, this is a stress test moment. Corporate climate pledges made pre-AI look to be cracking under infrastructure pressure.
"What’s needed now is a broader reckoning – across hyperscalers, climate target frameworks, and the industry as a whole – on what credible climate commitments look like in an era of behind-the-meter gas and exponential AI demand," said Boris Gamazaychikov, the former head of AI sustainability at Salesforce.
"The systems we have weren’t built for this moment," Gamazaychikov told Bloomberg. "And pretending they still work serves no one."