Microsoft said on Wednesday that it will continue to purchase enough renewable energy to meet all of its electricity needs. The company, which invests heavily in artificial intelligence, achieved this goal for the first time last year.
The company announced that it reached its goal of contracting 40 gigawatts of new renewable energy supply last year, mainly through power purchase agreements — long-term contracts that help energy utilities move forward with new projects.
According to Microsoft, 19 gigawatts of this renewable energy have already been supplied to the power grid, with the remainder over the next five years, covering 26 countries in total.
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“As we continue to grow, we want to maintain that 100%,” said Microsoft’s head of cloud computing operations, Noelle Walsh, at the sprawling West Dublin campus where the company built its first data processing center outside the United States in 2009.
Microsoft’s sustainability director, Melanie Nakagawa, told Reuters that carbon-free electricity, like the agreement Microsoft signed in 2024 with North American Constellation Energy to restart a nuclear plant in the US state of Pennsylvania, will play an increasingly important role in the company continuing to meet its 100% target by 2030, when the company aims to have become carbon negative.
Microsoft said separately on Wednesday that it is on track to invest US$50 billion by 2030 to expand AI to countries in the ‘Global South’. The majority of the resources will finance data processing and AI centers.
