Microsoft<\/a> has promised to keep buying enough renewable energy to match all its electricity needs after meeting that \u200cgoal for the first time last year, as tech giants ramp up \u200ccapital expenditure on an AI-fuelled expansion of power-hungry data centres.<\/p>\nThe company said on Wednesday that it had reached \u200bits 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.<\/p>\n
Nineteen gigawatts of that renewable energy has already been supplied to the power grid, Microsoft said, with \u200cthe rest to follow over \u2060the next five years and covering 26 countries in total.<\/p>\n
“As we continue to grow we want to maintain that 100%,” Microsoft’s cloud \u2060operations chief Noelle Walsh said at the sprawling West Dublin campus where the company built its first data centre outside the United States in 2009.<\/p>\n
Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa told \u200bReuters that \u200bcarbon-free electricity, such as the deal Microsoft \u200bsigned in 2024 with Constellation Energy \u200cto 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.<\/p>\n
$50 BILLION INVESTMENT<\/p>\n
Microsoft said separately on Wednesday that it was on pace to invest $50 billion by 2030 to expand AI to countries across \u200cthe ‘Global South’, most of which will fund cloud \u200band AI data centres.<\/p>\n
Walsh said a recent Irish \u200bgovernment move to lift an effective \u200bmoratorium on data centre grid connections would allow Microsoft to meet “tremendous” \u200cpent-up demand in the tech-rich country.<\/p>\n
Microsoft \u200bexpects to press ahead \u200bwith 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 \u200bfrom additional renewable power begins \u200cto be implemented next month, Eoin Doherty, Microsoft’s cloud operations lead for \u200bEMEA, said.<\/p>\n
Data centres accounted for 22% of Ireland’s power consumption in 2024.<\/p>\n
(Reporting \u200bby Padraic Halpin; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Padraic Halpin DUBLIN, Feb 18 (Reuters) – Microsoft has promised to keep buying enough renewable energy to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":476465,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[28,10377,1281,58000,220492,1869],"class_list":["post-476464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-data-centres","tag-microsoft","tag-power-grid","tag-power-purchase-agreements","tag-renewable-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/476465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}