If you want evidence of Microsoft’s progress towards its environmental “moonshot” goal, then look closer to earth: at a building site on a west London industrial estate.
The company’s Park Royal Center is part of its commitment to drive the expansion of artificial intelligence (AI). Still, that ambition is jarring with its target of being carbon-negative by 2030.
Microsoft says the center will be run entirely on renewable energy. However, the construction of data centers and the servers they are filled with means that the company’s scope three emissions – such as CO2 related to the materials in its buildings and the electricity people consume when using products such as Xbox – are more than 30% above their 2020 level. As a result, the company is exceeding its overall emissions target by roughly the same rate.
This week, Microsoft’s co-founder, Bill Gates, claimed AI would help combat climate change because big tech is “seriously willing” to pay extra to use clean electricity sources to ” say that they’re using green energy.”
AI has been problematic for Microsoft’s green goals in the short term. Microsoft’s outspoken president Brad Smith once called its carbon ambitions a “moonshot.” In May, stretching that metaphor to breaking point, he admitted that because of its AI strategy, “the moon has moved.” It plans to spend £2.5bn over the next three years on growing its AI datacentre infrastructure in the UK and this year has announced new datacentre projects worldwide, including in the US, Japan, Spain, and Germany.
Training and operating the AI models that underpin products such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini uses a lot of electricity to power and cool the associated hardware, with additional carbon generated by making and transporting the related equipment.
“It is a technology that is driving up energy consumption,” says Alex de Vries, the founder of Digiconomist, a website monitoring the environment…