Tech companies’ relentless push into artificial intelligence is coming at an undisclosed cost to the planet. Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are concealing their actual carbon footprints, buying credits tied to electricity use that inaccurately erase millions of tons of planet-warming emissions from their carbon accounts, a Bloomberg Green analysis finds. Recently Microsoft reported that its emissions are 30% higher today than in 2020, when it set a goal to become carbon negative. Other tech companies’ emissions are rising, too. However, Microsoft and other AI leaders insist that the increase is because of the carbon-intensive materials used to build data centers — cement, steel and microchips — and not because of the massive amount of energy AI requires. That’s because they have said the power is mostly or all from zero-carbon sources, such as solar and wind. Is AI being powered exclusively by clean energy? “There is no physical reality for that claim,” said Michael Gillenwater, executive director of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. Companies are buying credits — called unbundled renewable energy certificates (RECs) — that can make it seem that power consumed from a coal plant came from a solar farm instead. Amazon, Microsoft and Meta rely on millions of unbundled RECs each year to claim emission reductions when making voluntary disclosures to CDP, a nonprofit that runs a global environmental reporting system. The current carbon accounting rules allow for the use of these credits for calculating a company’s carbon footprint. However, work that many academics have done shows the accounting rules need to be updated in order to accurately reflect greenhouse-gas emissions.
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