In its 2024 Environmental Sustainability Report, published May 15, 2024, Microsoft disclosed that its emissions across all scopes were up 29.1 percent from its 2020 baseline. The company said the increase came primarily from rising Scope 3 emissions, which grew 30.9 percent, driven by the construction of more data centers and the embodied carbon in building materials and hardware such as semiconductors, servers, and racks. Its more directly controlled Scope 1 and 2 emissions fell 6.3 percent over the same period.
The figure was a striking admission for a company that had pledged to be carbon negative by 2030. It put a hard number on a pattern visible across the industry: the physical buildout of AI and cloud infrastructure - pouring concrete, fabricating chips, and filling halls with servers - was driving emissions up sharply, with the embodied carbon of construction, not just operating electricity, a major part of the story.