In 2021, Microsoft made one of the most ambitious clean energy pledges in corporate history. The company called it 100/100/0: match 100 percent of electricity consumption, 100 percent of the time, with zero-carbon energy purchases. Not annually. Hourly. From the same grids it draws power from.

Now, according to Bloomberg, Microsoft is considering delaying or outright abandoning that target. The reason is exactly what you think it is: AI data centers consume so much electricity that matching it all with clean energy every hour is becoming impossible.

Microsoft has been adding approximately one gigawatt of data center capacity every three months. To put that in perspective, one gigawatt is enough to power 750,000 homes. And every one of those gigawatts needs to run around the clock to train and serve AI models.

The Numbers Are Ugly

Since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, carbon emissions have surged across Big Tech. Microsoft's emissions are up 23 percent. Meta's are up 64 percent. Google's climbed 51 percent. Amazon increased 33 percent. Every one of these companies made aggressive clean energy pledges. Every one of them is watching those pledges collide with reality.

According to BloombergNEF, US data center power consumption will more than double to 106 gigawatts by 2035. And here is the kicker: while renewables will meet nearly 50 percent of global data center growth, in the US specifically, natural gas will dominate. The country building the most AI infrastructure is going to burn the most fossil fuel to run it.

Alexia Kelly, former director of net zero and nature at Netflix and now managing director of carbon policy at High Tide Foundation, put it bluntly: "In the race to get data centres up and running as soon as possible, clean energy targets are out of the window. Gas seems to be the fuel of choice."

The Real Cost of AI Nobody Talks About

This is the story the AI industry desperately does not want you to connect. The same companies spending $266 million on TV ads to make you trust AI are simultaneously considering abandoning their climate promises because AI uses too much power. The same week OpenAI advocates for electric grid spending, its primary compute partner might be giving up on clean electricity.

A Microsoft spokesperson told Bloomberg the company "continues to look for opportunities to maintain an annual matching goal" but pointedly did not comment on the hourly commitment. When a company responds to questions about its most ambitious target by talking about a weaker one, you already have your answer.

Talks inside Microsoft are ongoing and no final decision has been made, Bloomberg reports. But the direction is clear. The AI race is moving faster than the clean energy transition. And when those two things conflict, we now know which one wins.