![How AI is hurting Microsoft’s carbon footprint How AI is hurting Microsoft’s carbon footprint](https://media.lesechos.com/api/v1/images/view/66463d9e8b2f4d52d85dea17/1280x720/0901031147664-web-tete.jpg)
Microsoft is in the firmament of world market capitalizations. The Silicon Valley giant has exceeded $3,000 billion in stock market value this year thanks in particular to its acceleration in artificial intelligence, which is whetting investors’ appetites.
But these investments also have a less glorious side: the explosion of carbon emissions. Microsoft’s CO2 emissions jumped 30% in 2023 compared to 2020, the base year for the company. In fact, over the past four years, they have only increased year after year.
It’s no secret that generative AI is very energy intensive. To train a large artificial intelligence model, millions of data must be scanned, which requires very significant computing power and suitable servers. In the case of Microsoft, the company has developed Copilot, a model implemented in its IT suite for businesses. She also signed a long-term partnership with OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, even if the idyll seems to be coming to an end.
Neutrality in 2030
All this has not helped Microsoft reduce its energy bill, supposed to reach neutrality in 2030, according to the objectives that the company has set. “In many ways, the Moon is five times further away than it was in 2020, just thinking about our own predictions about the expansion of AI and its power requirements,” acknowledged Brad Smith, the boss of Microsoft, in an interview with Bloomberg.
Clearly, the advent of AI could well thwart Microsoft’s climate objectives in the short and medium term. And the efforts to reduce the emissions of this new tool that promises a flamboyant future will have to be colossal: more efficient and less water-intensive data centers, less consuming chips, use of carbon-free energy, etc.
On the subject of data centers, Microsoft plans to open new ones, infrastructures “designed and optimized to support AI workloads (which) will not consume water for their cooling. This initiative aims to further reduce our global dependence on freshwater resources as demand for AI computing increases,” the company promises in this report.
The construction of these future data centers in the United States but also in Europe and Asia requires the use of cement and steel, two components whose carbon impact is also high. Microsoft plans to spend $50 billion on its data centers between July 2023 and June 2024, and the envelope could swell in the coming months.
Greening energy production
Microsoft assures that AI hardly contributes to the increase in emissions, explaining that the technology is massively powered by renewable energies. However, these assertions are questionable, as Bloomberg explains: certain American companies, including tech giants like Google, Meta or Amazon, massively buy renewable energy credits (RECs) to green their balance sheets, which does not necessarily mean a absence of emissions. Thus, in 2022, Microsoft ensured that 50% of its energy came from renewable resources. Management specifies that this way of communicating will disappear in the coming years.
To compensate, and like all the major players in the sector, the American flagship of IT affirms that AI, as consuming as it is, is also the ideal solution, in the long term, to overcome global warming thanks to optimization of technologies and the best allocation of resources. From there to offsetting an astronomical carbon footprint? This remains to be proven.