Major data centers face mounting pressure to achieve sustainability targets amid accelerating power consumption from AI workloads.

Artificial intelligence's appetite for power is exploding, with Nvidia moving beyond its current 120 kW-per-rack systems toward 600 kW designs. Facing this surging demand, Big Tech's environmental pledges are increasingly strained. Microsoft has pledged to be carbon negative by 2030, Google has committed to a net-zero carbon footprint across its value chain by 2030, and Amazon is targeting net-zero emissions by 2040. Yet their emissions continue to climb: Microsoft's CO2 emissions increased nearly 30 percent since 2020, Amazon's rose 34.5 percent from 2019, and Google's jumped 48 percent from 2019. While datacenters are among the fastest-growing emissions sources, their share of total energy sector emissions through 2035 is expected to remain below 1.5 percent, representing 300 to 500 megatonnes.

To meet their commitments, hyperscalers are pursuing increasingly exotic offset methods. Microsoft recently signed an agreement with Terradot to remove 12,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere between 2026 and 2029 through enhanced rock weathering (ERW), a process theorized in the 1990s that uses mineral reactions to sequester atmospheric carbon in rock. Terradot accelerates this naturally occurring process by spreading finely ground minerals over large land areas, with the larger surface area allowing minerals to react with carbon absorbed by rainwater to form new carbon-rich minerals, potentially an order of magnitude faster. Microsoft is also pursuing direct air capture (DAC) through a partnership with 1PointFive targeting 500,000 metric tons of CO2 by 2030. Amazon has worked with both 1PointFive and CarbonCapture Inc since 2023, while Google tapped Holocene's DAC technology to address emissions in the 2030s.

However, both carbon capture approaches face significant challenges. MIT climate researchers wrote in a 2023 article that while enhanced rock weathering's underlying concept is sound, it remains far from proven. Mining, grinding, and transporting rock requires substantial energy, meaning ERW must absorb more CO2 than it generates to provide net benefit. Additionally, some optimal mineral candidates like olivine could add CO2 through secondary reactions with iron. DAC suffers from similar core challenges: CO2 concentration in the air is about 300 times less than in industrial smokestacks, making capture much less efficient and considerably more expensive. Despite these obstacles, many believe DAC costs will decline over time, with Google hoping to see the technology reach $100 per ton by the early 2030s.

The scale of carbon capture investments remains insufficient relative to actual emissions. In its 2023 sustainability report, Microsoft disclosed it had contracted to capture 5 million metric tons of CO2 over a 15-year period—yet the company generated 17.2 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent in fiscal year 2023 alone. This gap illustrates the challenge of relying primarily on carbon capture to meet net-zero commitments without significantly reducing underlying emissions.

To address their massive GPU deployments, hyperscalers are also betting heavily on nuclear energy. Amazon acquired Cumulus Data's atomic datacenters for $650 million, gaining access to up to 960 megawatts of the Susquehanna nuclear power plant's total capacity, though the cloud provider has encountered challenges regarding how much capacity it can actually claim. Microsoft similarly partnered with Constellation Energy in late summer, as hyperscalers pursue a range of nuclear strategies from behind-the-meter deployments at existing plants to investments in small modular reactors and fusion power.