Microsoft may shelve 2030 clean energy target as AI lifts power use: Bloomberg News

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.


Microsoft did ​not immediately respond to a ⁠Reuters request for ‌comment.

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.