Microsoft to keep buying enough renewable energy to match all its electricity needs

Microsoft has promised to keep buying enough ​renewable energy to match all its electricity needs after ⁠meeting that goal for the first time last year, as tech giants ramp up capital expenditure on an AI-fuelled expansion of power-hungry data ‌centres.

The company said on Wednesday that it had reached its 2025 goal by contracting 40 gigawatts of ‌new renewable energy supply, mainly through power purchase agreements – ‌long-term ⁠contracts that help utility providers to bring new projects ⁠forward. Nineteen gigawatts of that renewable energy has already been supplied to the power grid, Microsoft said, with the rest to follow over the next five ​years and covering 26 ‌countries in total.

“As we continue to grow we want to maintain that 100%,” Microsoft’s cloud operations chief Noelle Walsh said at the sprawling West Dublin campus where the company built ‌its first data centre outside the United States in ​2009.

Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa told Reuters that carbon-free electricity, such as the deal Microsoft signed in ⁠2024 with Constellation Energy to restart a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, would play an increasing role in continuing to meet the 100% ‌matching target out to 2030, by which time the Windows maker aims to have become carbon negative.

Microsoft said separately on Wednesday that it was on pace to invest $50 billion by 2030 to expand AI to countries across the ‘Global South’, most of which will fund cloud and AI ‌data centres.

Walsh said a recent Irish government move to lift an effective moratorium ​on data centre grid connections would allow Microsoft to meet “tremendous” pent-up demand in the tech-rich country.

Microsoft expects ⁠to press ahead with stalled proposals for a data centre campus outside ⁠Dublin once a regulatory policy requiring new data centres to meet at least 80% of annual demand from ‌additional renewable power begins to be implemented next month, Eoin Doherty, Microsoft’s cloud operations lead for EMEA, said.

Data centres ​accounted for 22% of Ireland’s power consumption in 2024.