Microsoft Greenhouse Gas Emissions Increase By 30 Percent Due To AI Development

JAKARTA - Microsoft, a multinational technology company, is getting further and further with a carbon-negativity target by the end of this year. This is because the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced by the company is increasing dramatically. Based on the Verge report, Microsoft's greenhouse gas emissions increased by 30 percent in fiscal year 2023. This increase shows that Microsoft is struggling to achieve their targets, moreover they are focusing on Artificial Intelligence (AI). The presence of AI is urgently needed by current technology companies, but training and running any AI model will consume more energy. The higher Microsoft's obsession with AI, the more and more carbon-negligible targets are achieved. This difficulty begins to be seen in Microsoft's 2024 Sustainability report. In the report, it is recorded that Microsoft produced 15,357 million metric tons of carbon dioxide during the last fiscal year. This amount of carbon is equivalent to carbon pollution in Brunei. Since 2020, Microsoft has been trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than half of what they normally produce. They are also trying to capture more carbon emissions than the amount they generate each year. Microsoft is already partnering with energy companies such as Stockholm Energy to capture carbon and eliminate its carbon permanently. Through this collaboration, Microsoft and Exergi targeted carbon reduction of up to 3.3 million tons.

This is a very large amount, but it may not be equivalent to the company's ambitions towards AI. In the next few years, Microsoft plans to build more data centers that will certainly spend more energy. Data centers to train AI are much more wasteful than traditional data centers. Usually, these data centers consume more electricity to run servers and cooling systems. The more data centers are created, the greater Microsoft's challenges are in reducing carbon emissions.