Microsoft's Struggle with Carbon Emissions and Sustainability Goals

TapTechNews May 17th news, Microsoft ambitiously announced in early 2020 that it not only aims to achieve carbon negative emissions by 2030, but also to offset all the carbon footprints generated since the company's establishment by 2050. However, the road to carbon negative emissions seems not so smooth.

This week, Microsoft released its 2024 Environmental Sustainability Report. The report pointed out that Microsoft's new data center construction for cloud computing and artificial intelligence services has led to a significant increase in its indirect carbon emissions.

TapTechNews noticed that Microsoft President Brad Smith said that compared to 2020, the company's direct operational emissions (Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions) in fiscal 2023 did indeed decrease by 6.3%.

However, this reduction was offset by a huge increase in indirect emissions (Scope 3 emissions). Compared to 2020, Scope 3 emissions in fiscal 2023 increased by an astonishing 30.9%. Smith wrote that the combined emissions of direct and indirect emissions in fiscal 2023 increased by 29.1% compared to 2020.

The increase in Scope 3 emissions mainly comes from the implied carbon in the building materials and hardware components (such as semiconductors, servers and racks) used in the data center construction process, Smith pointed out. As a leading cloud service provider constantly expanding data centers, we face unique challenges. But more importantly, it also reflects the problems that the world urgently needs to overcome in the development and use of greener concrete, steel, fuels and chips. These are the main driving factors of our Scope 3 emissions challenge.

Smith added that Microsoft has now launched a company-wide initiative aimed at reducing Scope 3 emissions, and the new policy requires Microsoft's major suppliers to use completely carbon-free power to deliver Microsoft's products and services by 2030.

As is known to all, many data centers require a large amount of water to cool the huge server clusters. Smith said this week that Microsoft's latest designed data centers will be completely independent of water for cooling. Whether these measures can help Microsoft achieve the carbon negative emissions target in just six years, let's wait and see.