Last summer, it began to become clear how much the mad rush to build data centers for the artificial intelligence boom has hindered corporate sustainability goals. That’s when tech giants released their annual environmental reports for 2023, the first full year since OpenAI released ChatGPT.
Microsoft reported a nearly 30% uptick in emissions over the course of three years. And, the company reported, the amount of electricity Microsoft consumed per dollar of revenue increased by more than 50% during that time. Google said its emissions had increased by nearly 50% over the course of four years, and its data centers specifically had jumped in energy consumption by over 17% in 2023 alone. Meta likewise reported data center-specific metrics, including a 34% increase in total data center energy in 2023, and a nearly 32% increase in location-based emissions.
(Amazon only reports electricity use on an organization level and does not share location-based metrics.)
Accordingly, it’s looking less and less likely that these companies will reach their 2030 — and in Amazon’s case, 2040 — net zero goals. To even get close, the role of carbon removal in helping corporations meet those deadlines is growing, said Brian Marrs, who leads energy and carbon removal at Microsoft.
“We may need carbon removal to backstop 2030 net zero targets across our industry, because it will be very difficult to fully decarbonize the entire [supply chain] over that time period,” Marrs said at a virtual event with Data Center Dynamics last week.
Microsoft, which is already the largest purchaser of carbon removal, is “prepared to position carbon removal” to help meet those targets, he added. “If we’re serious about net zero, we need to get serious about carbon removal.” (Microsoft has also committed to remove the equivalent of its historic emissions by 2050, a target that is only possible via carbon removal.)
Corporate renewable energy PPAs, Marrs added, will continue to be very important, “but it’s simply not enough to get to net zero.”
Microsoft has a rolling request for CDR proposals, he explained, and at any given time his team is working through some 80 of them. And the company has scaled its CDR approach rapidly in just a few years, currently making more than 30 purchase agreements a year, he said.
In November, for instance, Microsoft signed a first-of-a-kind deal to buy removal credits from direct air capture project developer Deep Sky, one that is both tech agnostic and is designed to deliver on the shorter timeline.
In particular, Marrs said that carbon removal will be a key means of addressing the hard-to-abate data center emissions, such as from steel, concrete, and “carbon in fuels” that don’t yet have scalable or affordable emissions-free alternatives — and aren’t likely to have them by the time corporate net zero deadlines roll around.
“I really view carbon removal as the next PPA in our industry,” Marrs said; he made the same point while unpacking the Deep Sky deal to Latitude Media last month.
And that’s how corporate buyers should be thinking about their purchases, he said: signing 15- or 20-year deals with CDR developers.
In 2025, he added, that “CDR PPA” approach necessitates that buyers work together more closely, including via advance market commitments like Frontier: “That advance market commitment concept, which we also see in the energy sector, will really play an important role in streamlining demand, sending a signal for innovation, and getting really high-quality projects built.”
