Microsoft Reports a Massive 25 Percent Jump in Emissions

Microsoft’s greenhouse gas pollution increased by roughly 25 percent last year, the company says in its new sustainability report released Thursday.

The report follows similar ones released by Google and Amazon last week. Together, they show a troubling trend of rising tech company emissions, driven by the global race to build out power-hungry data centers .

In a blog post announcing the report, Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith and chief sustainability officer Melanie Nakagawa say that the emissions increase is driven “primarily by the expansion of our datacenter infrastructure.”

A significant portion of that increase, they write, was tied to emissions from energy the company purchased or acquired to run its operations. Known as Scope 2 emissions, that greenhouse gas pollution accounted for 13 percent of Microsoft’s total.

Data centers, which use large amounts of energy running artificial intelligence chips, have pushed many large tech companies’ net-zero goals increasingly out of reach over the past few years.

Amazon disclosed a 16 percent increase in its CO 2 emissions in its recent sustainability report. Google said in its new sustainability report that annual greenhouse gas emissions rose 18 percent last year compared to 2024, the biggest single-year increase it’s recorded. The company has aggressively invested in renewable energy, but it’s also begun adding fossil fuel power for some of its data centers.

Microsoft highlighted in its sustainability report that it had matched 100 percent of its electricity consumption with carbon-free sources. But the data center build-out is set to accelerate—and some of Microsoft’s recent investments could drive its emissions higher . Notably, the new report covers the 2025 fiscal year, which ended last June, and has made a number of deals since then involving gas-powered data centers.

Last month, the company officially announced a partnership with Chevron, which is building a power plant to supply a future data center for the company in West Texas. Permits show that that power plant could emit more than 11.5 million tons of CO 2 equivalent annually, an amount greater than the entire state of Rhode Island. The company has also leased buildings on the Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas, which will be powered by an onsite power plant that could emit more than 7.8 million tons of CO 2 equivalent each year. Microsoft has also signed a nonbinding letter of intent for compute at a West Virginia data center, which would be powered by off-grid gas that could emit more than 11 million tons of greenhouse gases .