The Math Doesn't Match the Marketing
Microsoft has purchased 8.55 million metric tons of carbon removal credits so far this year, roughly 80 percent less than it bought over the same stretch of 2025. Even now, the company insists nothing has changed. Its emissions, meanwhile, tell a different story: fiscal 2025 output ran to roughly 20 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent, a 25 percent jump from the year before, driven almost entirely by the electricity bill for its own data centers.
The Algorithm has apparently developed a taste for coal.
A Buying Spree, Then a Quiet Retreat
Last year Microsoft signed for 45 million metric tons of carbon removal across 21 companies — double its 2024 volume, nine times its 2023 volume, and by any measure the largest corporate purchase of its kind on record. This year it has one publicly disclosed deal to show for itself: 650,000 metric tons from a company called BioCirc, agreed to in May. Sources within the Corporate Sustainability Community note that going from a record-setting bulk order to a single modest one in twelve months is not typically what "disciplined approach" looks like on a chart, though it is apparently what it looks like in a press statement.
The company did not send flowers to its own climate targets on the way out.
"Not a Change in Ambition"
Asked about the falloff, Microsoft offered the sort of sentence that exists specifically to be quoted without being wrong: "Any adjustments we make are part of our disciplined approach, not a change in ambition." One presumes ambition, unlike a purchase order, does not show up on a balance sheet. The company still says it intends to go carbon negative by 2030, and still says it will one day remove enough carbon to offset every ton it has emitted since its 1975 founding — a target that gets no easier to hit the fewer tons of removal it actually buys.
In a development that will surprise no one who has been paying attention, ambition is free. Metric tons are not.
Everyone Else Felt It Too
Microsoft has been the single largest buyer in the voluntary carbon removal market since 2020, and when the largest buyer steps back, the market notices: total global carbon removal credit sales fell 66 percent through mid-July compared with the same period last year. The Machine that was supposed to justify its own power bill by funding the cleanup has, for now, simply stopped funding quite so much of it.
The removal industry has filed its numbers. The data center, as ever, remains plugged in.
Sources: Bloomberg · Carbon Credits
