Microsoft’s AI obsession is destroying the company’s climate goals

Technology giant Microsoft recently released its sustainability report for the 2023 financial year, and it didn’t exactly have positive numbers. Microsoft set a climate goal in 2020 to become carbon negative by 2030, sequestering more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it emits, but the company seems to be on the wrong track to achieve this goal. Microsoft’s greenhouse gas emissions increased by 30 percent in the 2023 financial year — and it’s all Copilot’s fault.

The big culprit is the company’s huge AI investments. It takes huge amounts of energy to train and use AI models. The International Energy Agency expects energy consumption for data centers worldwide to increase from 460 TWh in 2022 to between 620 and 1,050 TWh by 2026, due to AI and cryptocurrency use. For context, Sweden’s total energy consumption in 2022 was approximately 508 TWh.

Microsoft CEO Brad Smith confirmed in an interview with Bloomberg that the previous climate goals are now much harder to reach, precisely because of AI.

“In 2020, we unveiled our ambitious carbon target. That was before the explosion in artificial intelligence. In many ways, we are now five times further away from reaching them than we were in 2020, if you just think about our own forecast for the expansion of AI and its electricity needs,” Smith said.

Further reading: Copilot Pro: What can Microsoft 365’s premium AI do?