Zero
Microsoft Wanted to be Carbon Negative. Then It Went Big on AI
If Microsoft is shooting for the moon on decarbonization, the moon is “more than five times as far away as it was in 2020,” President Brad Smith says on Zero.
Brad Smith, president of Microsoft Corp., speaks during the Business 20 Summit in New Delhi in August 2023.
Photographer: Prakash Singh/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
In 2020, Microsoft made an ambitious pledge: It would be carbon-negative by the end of the decade. The company was acting in response to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2018 warning that, if the world wanted to keep warming below 1.5C, emissions needed to fall fast.
It was an ambitious target, but at the time it seemed achievable. Now that’s changed. New figures show that Microsoft’s total emissions in 2023 were about 30% higher than in 2020.