Since 2020, Microsoft has increased its carbon emissions by 30% as a result of setting up data centres, the company revealed in its annual sustainability report on Wednesday. The data signals the gap between the company’s climate goals and reality as it competes in the AI race.
In 2020, the Satya Nadella-led company had set an ambitious target of becoming carbon negative by the end of the decade. This was before the AI explosion that has forced tech companies to find ways to build compute to train power-hungry AI models.
According to the report, Microsoft’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, which are generated by the company’s activities and electricity or heat consumed has decreased by 6.3% compared to 2020.
“Our challenges are in part unique to our position as a leading cloud supplier that is expanding its data centres,” Microsoft said in its annual sustainability report. Last year alone, these [data centres] have pumped out 15.357 million metric tons of carbon dioxide which is comparable to the annual carbon pollution of Haiti or Brunei, The Verge stated.
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As per a new requirement, the company will ask its main suppliers to use 100% renewable energy by the end of the decade. Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa said the company will require “select scale, high-volume suppliers to use 100% carbon-free electricity by 2030” for goods and services delivered.
With climate change coming into focus globally in the recent years, the growing carbon footprint of AI models will be an added challenge.
A study by researchers from AI firm Hugging Face and Carnegie Mellon University has shown that generating a single image from AI consumes as much energy as fully charging a smartphone.
