Can Microsoft build massive AI data centers and meet climate goals without ‘greenwashing’?

When it comes to AI, it’s not easy being green. 

The technology requires massive amounts of computing power, which means consuming massive amounts of electricity. Giant new AI-focused data centers powered by carbon-intensive electricity plants are being built and planned across the US — and those plants are, as a group, far dirtier than plants not devoted to AI. 

 “The carbon intensity of electricity used by data centers [devoted to AI] was 48% higher than the US average,” MIT Technology Review found in an analysis. In fact,  US data centers will be fifth largest consumers of electricity in the world by 2026, according to one MIT estimate. If they were considered a nation, they would be just behind Japan and ahead of Russia.

Microsoft, the world’s largest AI company, has been working at full tilt to do whatever it can to secure enough energy to meet its aggressive AI plans, and will spend $80 billion in the next three years to do so  — the largest investment in infrastructure in the company’s history. At the same time, Microsoft has also vowed to be carbon-negative by 2030, meaning it will take more carbon out of the atmosphere than it puts in.

Those goals seem incompatible. Can the company really spend so much on generating electricity while becoming carbon-negative in five years without resorting to misleading “greenwashing” sleight-of-hand?

I’ve taken a close look at the company’s plans for trying to do that. Here’s what I found.

Burying millions of tons of human poop

Because Microsoft will generate so much electricity to power its data centers over the next five years, its plans to become carbon negative focus on buying carbon removal credits. (Apple and others are doing the same thing.)

Its latest carbon removal investment sounds more like something you’d hear from a late-night standup comic rather than from a staid, nearly $4 trillion company. It’s made a deal with a company called  Vaulted Deep to bury 4.9 million tons of biowaste slurry 5,000 feet underground. The slurry includes human waste from sewage systems, manure from farms, and sludge from paper mills.

Vaulted Deep collects the slop from industrial sites and municipalities. Burying it deep underground stops it from decomposing, so greenhouse gases, including CO2 and methane, aren’t released into the atmosphere. Vaulted Deep sells these credits to companies that want to offset their carbon emissions. 

Reports indicate the credits sell for approximately $350 a metric ton, and that Microsoft has agreed to purchase 4.9 million tons of them over the next 12 years. If those estimates  are accurate, Microsoft will spend approximately $1.75 billion for the credits.

This is only the latest in many deals the company has made to offset carbon emissions. Its carbon removal program includes a variety of technologies, including direct air capture of carbon, carbon dioxide sequestration projects, and others. Microsoft claims it won’t use “greenwashing” tricks such as are often used in rainforest-based offsets. (An investigation by The Guardian and others found “more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by [the] biggest certifier are worthless.”)

Kudos to Microsoft for its promise, if it’s true. However, the deep well injection technology used by Vaulted Deep has its detractors. The consulting group Sustainability Directory warns the technology could lead to groundwater contamination, surface leaks and spills, problematic geochemical reactions and increased seismic activity, possibly including earthquakes.

Not everyone agrees with that analysis. But there are those who argue that even if the technique is environmentally sound, the idea of carbon offsets itself is problematic. 

David Keith, head of the Climate Systems Engineering initiative at the University of Chicago and lead author of a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says, “I think all this voluntary stuff and companies claiming to be green is basically greenwashing crap.” Rather than relying on trusting companies’ climate change promises, he believes stringent federal laws should be used to restrict carbon emissions.

These days, that’s a pipe dream, given that President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is in the process of doing away with all climate change regulations. The administration has also developed a plan that would, as the The New York Times describes it, “impose fewer environmental regulations on the construction of new data centers” and “establish a fast-tracked permitting process” for them.

Where that leaves us

As long as the federal government denies climate change, kills environmental regulations to combat it, and is bent on fast-tracking the construction of power plants for AI data centers — no matter the effects on the environment — voluntary actions by Microsoft and other companies to reduce climate change is as good as we can expect for now.

Microsoft’s promises to combat climate change is welcomed. Not so clear is whether the carbon removal technologies it’s using to offset its massive electricity will really be on the up and up. For now, the best we can do is watch what the company does, investigate the carbon removal technologies in which it’s investing, and hold its feet to the fire to make sure it keeps its promises.