By Padraic Halpin
DUBLIN, Feb 18 (Reuters) – 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.
$50 BILLION INVESTMENT
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.
(Reporting by Padraic Halpin; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)
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