Technology giant Microsoft has released its 2024 sustainability report, saying it's on track in four out of six areas, but is failing to rein in indirect emissions and water usage for its data centres.
The company said it has reduced direct Scope 1 and 2 operational emissions somewhat, reporting that they're down 6.3% since Microsoft's 2020 baseline. However, Scope 3 indirect emissions since then have increased a whopping 30.9%.
Overall, Microsoft's emissions are up 29.1% across Scopes 1-3, from the 2020 baseline. Scope 1 includes directly generated emissions, from for example, burning gas and oil for heating, whereas Scope 2 is from using electricity, the amount of which the user in question is responsible for. Scope 3 on the other hand covers broader, indirect emissions generated by an organisation's operations, and can include for example, employees driving to work.
Microsoft said its Scope 3 emissions increase is primarily due to building more data centres. The materials used for building data centres come with embodied carbon, and there also the IT hardware such as semiconductors, servers and racks that add to the greenhouse gas tally. In 2020, Microsoft said its Scope 1-3 emissions were 11,444,000 metric tons, so a 29.1% increase would take the figure to 14,774,000 tons currently.
In New Zealand, Microsoft is building an Azure cloud computing with three geographically separate data centres, which the company said will be powered by fully renewable energy from get-go.
The company is also planning a gigantic new facility called Stargate with 5 gigawatts capacity, estimated to cost US$100 billion. That energy usage contrasts with Microsoft's contracted portfolio of renewable energy which is just below 20 gigawatt.
New Zealand's current power generation sits at 5154 megawatt, Transpower figures suggest.
Microsoft is looking for carbon-free electricity infrastructure and sources, and has signed up with Helion to buy 50 megawatt of power, generated by the world's first nuclear fusion plant, by 2028.
Data centres are also huge water users. While Microsoft didn't say how much it has overshot its water usage target with, it said that it achieved its contracted replenishment projects estimated to provide over 25 m3 "in volumetric water benefits over the lifetime of these projects". This, it said, is enough to fill around 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Microsoft is now trying to become "water positive" by reducing the intensity with which it withdraws resources. The new AI data centres will consume no water for cooling, Microsoft said.
Artificial intelligence (AI) which Microsoft is deploying across most areas of business, was singled out as one of the major technology changes since the company announced its commitment to be carbon negative, water positive and zero waste by 2030.
"... the infrastructure and electricity needed for these technologies create new challenges for meeting sustainability commitments across the tech sector," Microsoft's vice chair and president Brad Smith and the company's chief sustainability officer Melanie Nakagawa said.
Microsoft stopped short of saying whether or not the booming AI energy use with increased data centre construction would see it miss the 2030 net zero commitment.
It did however refer to the COP28 climate conference last year, to assess global sustainability goals, saying "the results were sobering". Recent reporting says almost 80% of scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are expecting at least 2.5 degrees centigrade heating this century, with disastrous effects on the planets.
Microsoft said it is providing access to petabytes of environmental monitoring data from around the world for researchers, governments, companies and individuals, through its Planetary Computer, "as the world experiences worsening impacts of climate change".
11 Comments
Because building, maintaining and delivering essential services & medicine will always increase emissions. The only thing that is always a decrease in emissions is massive unrelenting amounts of death to human populations in the shortest way possible. Covid & the lockdowns did more for the environment then most people are willing to admit because humans living life always increases emissions.
The picture chosen is the closest thing to toxic misinformation possible. You might as well put up a picture of a crying polar bear as well. The practice of clearing space for building using fire has been super ceded over 400 years ago and a large portion of fires in areas are caused by massive water drainage with poor managed use by urban cities for human living, intentional lighting of fires, electrics, and poor woodland management. SO HOW DOES IT RELATE TO MICROSOFT DATA CENTRES? Protip of all commercial buildings data centers have the least space needed per productive work & less long term emissions & water related to them, with less transport costs as well (fewest on site staff, more servers, and while cooling is a continuous process there is less related to humans so heating is not as needed, better more efficient systems can be used, and less sewage processing involved).
Compare the size of an office filled with humans to the data center with equal space sizes for heating and cooling, data centers have less waste heating/cooling, they have better insulation and cooling options (no need for large glass windows, desk space etc, they are less likely to need to heat unnecessarily, or open up to larger amounts of outside air & loss of energy used through regular door use), less waste water etc (and since water is a more efficient way to cool it can be used and cycled more then say that through a human body & the airconds to keep a temperate environment), and the data center processing the same amount of work as the office would require less waste energy in equipment, materials and appliances. Yes humans still do the backend development, analysis and management but we hardly need people handling paper forms and doing data entry for most transactions anymore. Filling a room full of female "computers" is no longer needed and a single shelf can do the work of a whole office that used to process manually. As the population has grown so too have our data needs and the population has grown A LOT.
You might as well post that picture with all money transactions and all food because no system of human endeavour and trade is without the impact on emissions, and each transaction we make is using and heavily dependent on servers managing data. Including sourcing plants and animals for next season and increasing soil nutrient values.
Look at the rate of human population growth and growth in industries and it is not hard to see a 30% increase is a small smaller number then expected.
You could argue any AI dev is unnecessary and in most cases it is and does not benefit society much above the existing human capabilities and uses far more energy on top e.g. AI bots trading back and forth with each other, capable of spinning up more bots. But a data center storing and acting as a vehicle for existing human lifecycle management & human development is actually the least impactful effect on the environment, ranking far below the emissions we use for housing, heating, feeding, educating, traveling, treating, and working already.
Think on it like the difference between the existing online payments system and cryptocurrency. We did need a record of transactions that could be legally upheld and disputed. We did not need an extra speculative market on top to do limited transactions but much slower, with no legal backing, with over 10x the computing power and energy use needed.
However Microsoft while it uses some untapped energy for the later AI operation mostly builds new data centers for the former data storage and transactions. So much of our data is captured, most of it related directly to daily living.
Compare storing 100million records on a server with the old traditional systems pre computer & pre paper of using tally bones & rock markings. There are not enough animal bones on the planet & available rock surface for the records we need to keep. To match a single server storage would mean we would need to eliminate whole regions of all animal life. Think on what the equivalent would be if we went back to paper records... think on the effects to the environment if we went back to human processing of paper records... It would be an environmental catastrophe.
Pay per use is also a complete erroneous assumption as people do not control most the data that is used in the lifecycle to maintain human life and what we do control & create out of luxury e.g. comments, are mostly made by lower income participants. Influencers of crazy shit don't get 10million billionaires following them with money to burn; it is mostly those who earn below the breadline with less money they cannot even afford the tech they use to make comments on. That is just the factor of most population dynamics and behaviour. Since our animal brains starting seeing other humans and wanted to watch them or follow them as leaders. Hence Religion. Not having that factor in our animal brains would significantly reduce emissions and improve human wellbeing. However we would also lose the most favourite targets of hate to use as scapegoats for societal failings as well. Hence pay per use on a data perspective is also incredibly unfair and uneven with little actually able to be directed, even less afforded and yet much of it incredibly necessary to maintain essential needs (e.g. medical data, payments data, account data, etc).
Lol. Who didn't see this coming?
How much of the data is actually useful and relevant to anyone? How much is just the storage of everyone's personal digital information?
The latest virtue signalling on my Microsoft start-up screen is how great AI is helping us to map and monitor deforestation. When will this wonderful tech tell us how to stop because we don't appear to have the intelligence to figure it out for ourselves.
I guess it depends on what you're using it for.
For a laugh I tried it with some coding problem and it was every bit as bad as 3.5. The time I spent trying to coach it through it's errors and hopefulness would have been better spent going back to documentation, reading it and having a critical think about what the issue was and how to solve it myself (which I did in the end anyway).
About the only thing I've found chatgpt vaguely useful for is becoming aware of some library I hadn't used before. But this is also something a bit of standard internet searching will get you anyway. And I find you're better off going straight to some forum where there's some useful comments about the pros and cons for certain coding problems and approaches whereas chatgpt just keeps apologising then proffering its next answer as the solution.
Admit I haven't tried using it for anything else though.
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