Microsoft Shows Big 25 Percent Jump in Emissions

Microsoft’s greenhouse gas emissions rose nearly 25 percent last year, the company said in its new sustainability report released Thursday.

The report follows similar reports released by Google and Amazon last week. Together, they show the troubling trend of rising emissions of technology companies, driven by global competition to produce power-hungry data center.

In a blog post announcing the report, Microsoft’s vice chairman and president Brad Smith and chief security officer Melanie Nakagawa said the increase in emissions was driven “primarily by the expansion of our data centers.”

They write that, a large part of the increase, was related to the emissions from the energy that the company bought or acquired to run its operations. Known as Scope 2 emissions, greenhouse gas emissions made up 13 percent of Microsoft’s emissions.

Data centers, which use a lot of power to use smart chips, have made many large technology companies unaffordable in the past few years.

Amazon revealed a 16 percent increase in CO₂ smoke in its latest sustainability report. Google he said In its new report, annual greenhouse gas emissions rose 18 percent last year compared to 2024. the biggest increase in one year it is written. The company has invested heavily in renewable energy, but it is starting to add more fuel efficiency for some data centers.

Microsoft highlighted in its sustainability report that it matched 100 percent of the electricity it uses with carbon-free sources. But the data center needs to accelerate—and some of Microsoft’s recent investments will to improve his masculinity. In particular, the new report covers the 2025 financial year, which ended last June, and has made several investments since then that involve gas-fired data centers.

Last month, the company officially announced a deal with Chevron, which produces electricity, to provide a data center for the company in West Texas. The permits show that the power plant could emit more than 11.5 million tons of CO₂ equivalent per year, more money than the entire state of Rhode Island. The company has also leased a building on the Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas, which will be powered by a power plant capable of emitting more than 7.8 million tons of CO.₂ the same every year. Microsoft has also signed a non-binding letter of intent for the West Virginia data center, which will be powered by natural gas off the grid. produces 11 million tons of greenhouse gases.

“Microsoft’s strategy includes exploring various ways to reduce emissions from electronics, in line with our sustainability ambitions,” Nakagawa said in a statement to WIRED.

Microsoft’s strategy to reduce its emissions through credits and other expenses is also changing. The company said it stopped buying renewable energy certificates that were not produced, which led to a gradual increase in Scope 2 emissions. The use of these types of certificates has been criticized in recent years as greenwashing because it does not add clean energy to the group. Non-compliant RECs are “paper trades that are removed from real results,” says Danny Cullenward, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. (Cullenward is a member of Google’s social engineering team but says he doesn’t speak for the company.)

“I think it’s very commendable that (Microsoft) is moving away from unused RECs and prioritizing investments in new electricity, where power purchase agreements and other long-term agreements can bring new electricity to the grid,” he adds.

Despite rising emissions and continued investment in AI, Microsoft still says it plans to be “carbon negative” by 2030. Smith and Nakagawa write that the global competition for AI “is an increase in … energy, water, land, and resources.” They say the company “has a responsibility to ensure that technology strengthens, rather than disrupts, the systems and communities that rely on it.”