Microsoft is considering delaying or abandoning its 2030 goal of matching its entire hourly electricity use with renewable energy purchases, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The expensive and energy-intensive push for data centers is reshaping the feasibility of Microsoft’s climate commitments that were made before the AI era and rank among the industry’s most ambitious targets, the report said.
The discussions were ongoing and no final decision has been made, Bloomberg News added.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company continues to look for opportunities to maintain its matching goal, pointing to recently signed agreements with We Energies to bring 1.2 gigawatts of carbon-free energy projects in Wisconsin onto the grid, including solar and battery projects expected to start coming online in December 2028.
Like rivals Amazon and Alphabet, the Windows maker is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build out artificial intelligence infrastructure needed to power services such as its Copilot assistant and Azure cloud service.
Some of the new data centers tech companies are developing are expected to have multiple gigawatts of capacity. A single gigawatt is enough to roughly power 750,000 U.S. homes.
The rush to power those data centers has sparked a flurry of deals, including those for nuclear energy. It has also boosted demand for natural gas, which some industry executives have said is faster and easier to deploy than renewables.
Microsoft in 2024 agreed a power deal with Constellation Energy to help resurrect a unit of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.
(Reporting by Aditya Soni in Bengaluru; Editing by Leroy Leo and Tasim Zahid)
