Microsoft executives have been considering these days concerning the finish of the world. In a white paper published late final 12 months, Brad Smith, the corporate’s vice chair and president, and Melanie Nakagawa, its chief sustainability officer, described a “planetary disaster” that AI may assist clear up. Think about an AI-assisted instrument that helps cut back meals waste, to call one instance from the doc, or some future know-how that might “expedite decarbonization” through the use of AI to invent new designs for inexperienced tech.
However as Microsoft makes an attempt to buoy its popularity as an AI chief in local weather innovation, the corporate can be promoting its AI to fossil-fuel firms. A whole bunch of pages of inside paperwork I’ve obtained, plus interviews I’ve carried out over the previous 12 months with 15 present and former staff and executives, present that the tech large has sought to market the know-how to firms similar to ExxonMobil and Chevron as a strong instrument for locating and creating new oil and fuel reserves and maximizing their manufacturing—all whereas publicly committing to dramatically cut back emissions.
Though tech firms have lengthy done business with the fossil-fuel {industry}, Microsoft’s case is notable. It demonstrates how the AI increase contributes to one of the crucial urgent points going through our planet in the present day—even if the know-how is commonly lauded for its supposed potential to enhance our world, as when Sam Altman testified to Congress that it may handle points similar to “local weather change and curing most cancers.” These offers additionally present how Microsoft can use the vagaries of AI to speak out of each side of its mouth, courting the fossil-fuel {industry} whereas asserting its environmental bona fides. (Most of the paperwork I seen have been submitted to the Securities and Alternate Fee as a part of a whistleblower criticism alleging that the corporate has omitted from public disclosures “the intense local weather and environmental harms brought on by the know-how it offers to the fossil gas {industry},” arguing that the data is of fabric and monetary significance to buyers. A Microsoft spokesperson mentioned the corporate was unaware of the submitting and had not been contacted by the SEC.)
For years, Microsoft routinely promoted its work with firms similar to Schlumberger, Chevron, Halliburton, ExxonMobil, Baker Hughes, and Shell. Round 2020, the identical 12 months Microsoft made formidable local weather commitments that included a aim to succeed in carbon negativity by 2030, the tech agency grew quieter about such partnerships and centered on messaging concerning the transition to web zero. Behind the scenes, Microsoft has continued to hunt enterprise from the fossil-fuel {industry}; paperwork associated to its general pitch technique present that it has sought energy-industry enterprise partially by advertising and marketing the talents to optimize and automate drilling and to maximise oil and fuel manufacturing. Over the previous 12 months, it has leaned into the generative-AI rush in an effort to clinch extra offers—every of which will be price greater than a whole lot of tens of millions of {dollars}. Microsoft staff have famous that the oil and fuel industries may signify a market alternative of $35 billion to $75 billion yearly, in response to paperwork I seen.
Based mostly on the paperwork, executives see these generative-AI instruments—the buzziest new know-how for the reason that iPhone, and one which Microsoft has invested billions of {dollars} in—as a form of secret weapon for consumer outreach. Throughout an inside convention name with greater than 200 staff final September, a Microsoft power exec named Bilal Khursheed famous that, for the reason that firm’s generative-AI investments, the power {industry} was turning to Microsoft for steerage on AI in a means that had maybe “by no means occurred earlier than.” “We have to maximize this chance. We have to lay out the pathway to adopting generative AI,” he mentioned, in response to a transcript of the assembly I seen. One such pathway? Utilizing generative algorithms to mannequin oil and fuel reservoirs and maximize their extraction, Hema Prapoo, Microsoft’s world lead of oil and fuel enterprise, mentioned later within the assembly. A number of paperwork additionally emphasize Microsoft’s distinctive relationship with OpenAI as an extra promoting level for power shoppers, suggesting that GPT may drive productiveness separate from fossil-fuel extraction. (OpenAI didn’t reply to a request for remark.)
From a enterprise perspective, in fact, Microsoft’s pursuit of huge offers with fossil-fuel firms is sensible. And such partnerships don’t essentially imply that the corporate is contradicting its local weather commitments. Microsoft executives have made the case that AI can even assist fossil-fuel firms enhance their environmental footprint. Certainly, each Microsoft and its power prospects defend their partnerships by arguing that their targets work in concord, not contradiction. They informed me that AI providers could make oil and fuel manufacturing extra environment friendly, growing manufacturing whereas lowering emissions—a chorus I noticed repeated in paperwork as a part of Microsoft’s gross sales pitches. As well as, a few of these firms run wind farms and photo voltaic parks, which additional profit from Microsoft’s cloud applied sciences. Microsoft has additionally touted exploratory tutorial analysis into how AI could possibly be used to find new supplies for lowering CO2 within the ambiance.
The concept that AI’s local weather advantages will outpace its environmental prices is essentially speculative, nevertheless, particularly provided that generative-AI instruments are themselves tremendously resource-hungry. Throughout the subsequent six years, the info facilities required to develop and run the sorts of next-generation AI fashions that Microsoft is investing in might use more power than all of India. They are going to be cooled by millions upon millions of gallons of water. All of the whereas, scientists agree, the world will get hotter, its local weather extra extreme.
Microsoft isn’t an organization that exists to battle local weather change, and it doesn’t should assume duty for saving our planet. But the corporate is making an attempt to persuade the general public that by investing in a know-how that can be getting used to counterpoint fossil-fuel firms, society might be higher outfitted to resolve the environmental disaster. Among the firm’s personal staff described this concept to me as ridiculous. To those staff, Microsoft’s power contracts display solely the unsavory actuality of how the corporate’s AI investments are literally used. Driving sustainability ahead? Possibly. Digging up fossil fuels? As Prapoo put it in that September convention name, it’s a “recreation changer.”
Before Holly Alpine left Microsoft earlier this 12 months—fed up, she mentioned, with the corporate’s continued help of fossil-fuel extraction—she had spent practically a decade there working in roles centered on power and the surroundings. Most not too long ago, she headed a program inside Microsoft’s cloud operations and innovation division that invests in environmental sustainability tasks within the communities that host the corporate’s information facilities. Alpine had additionally co-founded a sustainability curiosity group inside the firm seven years in the past that hundreds of staff now belong to. (Like the opposite named sources on this story, she didn’t present any of the paperwork I reviewed.)
Members of this group initially involved themselves with modest company issues, similar to getting the corporate’s eating halls to chop down on single-use gadgets. However their ambitions grew, partly in response to Microsoft’s personal climate commitments in 2020. These have been made throughout a second of heightened local weather activism; tens of millions around the globe, together with tech workers, had simply rallied to protest the dearth of coordinated motion to chop again carbon emissions.
Microsoft has failed to cut back its annual emissions annually since then. Its newest environmental report, released this May, exhibits a 29 p.c enhance in emissions since 2020—a change that has been pushed in no small half by current AI growth, as the corporate explains within the report. “All of Microsoft’s public statements and publications paint a ravishing image of the makes use of of AI for sustainability,” Alpine informed me. “However this concentrate on the positives is hiding the entire story, which is way darker.”
The basis difficulty for Alpine and different advocates is Microsoft’s unflagging help of fossil-fuel extraction. In March 2021, for instance, Microsoft expanded its partnership with Schlumberger, an oil-technology firm, to develop and launch an AI-enhanced service on Microsoft’s Azure platform. Azure offers cloud computing to quite a lot of organizations, however this product was tailored for the oil and fuel industries, to help within the manufacturing of fossil fuels, amongst different makes use of. The hope, in response to two inside displays I seen, was that it might assist Microsoft seize enterprise from lots of the main fossil-fuel suppliers. A spokesperson for Schlumberger declined to touch upon this deal.
Current AI advances have sophisticated the image, although they haven’t modified it. One slide deck from January 2022 that I obtained offered an evaluation of how Microsoft’s instruments may enable ExxonMobil to extend its annual income by $1.4 billion—$600 million of which might come from maximizing so-called sustainable manufacturing, or oil drilled utilizing much less power. (An ExxonMobil consultant declined to remark.) Different paperwork offered particulars on a number of offers Chevron has signed with Microsoft to entry the tech large’s AI platform and different cloud providers. An government technique memo from June 2023 indicated that Microsoft hoped to pitch Chevron on adopting OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to “ship extra enterprise worth.” A Chevron spokesperson informed me that the corporate makes use of AI partially to “determine efficiencies in exploration and restoration and assist cut back our environmental footprint.” There may be the stress. On the one hand, AI could possibly assist cut back drilling’s toll on the surroundings. However, it’s used for drilling.
How do these firms weigh the environmental advantages of a extra environment friendly drilling operation in opposition to the environmental harms of having the ability to drill extra, quicker? A Shell spokesperson offered a quantifiable instance of their considering: Microsoft’s Azure AI platform allowed Shell to calculate the most effective settings for its tools, driving down carbon emissions at a number of of its natural-gas amenities. One facility noticed an estimated discount of 340,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per 12 months. This appears spectacular: Using estimated emissions from the EPA, that is roughly the quantity of CO2 generated by 74,000 vehicles yearly. Relative to Shell’s complete emissions, nevertheless, it’s virtually insignificant. In keeping with the company’s own reporting, Shell was chargeable for about 1.2 billion metric tons of emissions final 12 months.
Inside Microsoft, members of the sustainability group have repeatedly petitioned management to vary its stance on these contracts. Google, for instance, announced in 2020 that it might not make customized AI instruments for fossil-fuel extraction—couldn’t Microsoft do the identical? “We’ve by no means advocated for reducing ties with the fossil-fuel {industry},” Alpine informed me. Microsoft may work with shoppers on their transition to wash power, with out explicitly supporting extraction, Alpine reasoned.
To assist make her case, Alpine offered a memo to Smith in December 2021 that calculated the results of the corporate’s oil and fuel offers. She pointed, for instance, to a single 2019 cope with ExxonMobil that might purportedly “develop manufacturing by as a lot as 50,000 oil-equivalent barrels a day by 2025,” according to a Microsoft press release. These additional barrels would produce an estimated 6.4 million metric tons of emissions, drastically outweighing a carbon-removal pledge that Microsoft made in 2020, she wrote. (I verified her estimate with a number of impartial carbon analysts. ExxonMobil declined to remark.)
Worker advocates requested firm management to amend its “Accountable AI” principles to deal with the environmental penalties of the know-how. The group additionally really useful additional restrictions on fossil-fuel-extraction tasks. Round this time, Microsoft as an alternative launched a new set of principles governing the corporate’s engagements with oil and fuel prospects. It was co-authored by Darryl Willis, the company vice chairman of Microsoft’s power division (and a former BP government who served as BP’s de facto spokesperson during the Deepwater Horizon crisis). Unsurprisingly, it didn’t undertake the entire group’s recommendations.
What it did embrace was a stipulation that Microsoft will help fossil-fuel extraction just for firms which have “publicly dedicated to web zero carbon targets.” This can be chilly consolation for some: A 2023 report from the Internet Zero Tracker, a collaboration between nonprofits and the College of Oxford, discovered that such commitments from fossil-fuel firms are “largely meaningless.” Most companies declare a net-zero goal that absolutely accounts just for their operational emissions, similar to whether or not their places of work, automobile fleets, or tools are powered with inexperienced power, whereas ignoring a lot of the emissions from the fossil fuels they produce.
When I talked with Willis about Microsoft’s power enterprise, he repeated time and again that “it’s sophisticated.” Willis defined that his workforce is concentrated on increasing power entry—“There are a billion folks on the planet who don’t have entry to power,” he mentioned—whereas additionally making an attempt to speed up the decarbonization of the world’s power. I requested him how Microsoft deliberate to realize the latter aim when it’s chasing contracts that assist firms drill for fossil fuels. “Our plan, candidly acknowledged, is to verify we’re partnering with the appropriate organizations who’re leaning in and making an attempt to speed up and pull this [sustainability] journey ahead,” he mentioned. In different phrases, the corporate doesn’t see its method to promoting the know-how as incompatible with its sustainability targets. “AI will clear up extra issues than it creates,” Willis informed me. “Loads of the dilemmas that we’re going through with power might be resolved due to the connection with generative AI.”
Hoping to know extra concerning the firm’s perspective, I additionally spoke with Alex Robart, a former Microsoft worker who left in 2022 and labored with Willis to write down the power ideas. He known as Microsoft’s method sensible. “Has Large Power, incumbent power, in plenty of methods behaved fairly badly, notably previously 25 to 40 years within the U.S. particularly, with reference to local weather? Yeah, completely,” he informed me. However he argued that fossil-fuel firms should be a part of the transition to cleaner options and can achieve this provided that they’ve monetary incentives. “You want their steadiness sheets; you want their capital; you want their project-management experience. We’re speaking about constructing huge infrastructure, and constructing infrastructure is difficult,” he mentioned. With out that, “it’s basically not going to work.”
Within the meantime, Microsoft has “not dedicated to a timeline” for phasing out work that’s geared towards discovering and creating new fossil-fuel reserves, a spokesperson mentioned.
Lucas Joppa, Microsoft’s first chief environmental officer, who left the corporate in 2022, fears that the world won’t be able to reverse the present trajectory of AI growth even when the know-how is proven to have a net-negative influence on sustainability. Corporations are designing specialised chips and information facilities only for superior generative-AI fashions. Microsoft is reportedly planning a $100 billion supercomputer to help the following generations of OpenAI’s applied sciences; it may require as a lot power yearly as 4 million American houses. Abandoning all of this might be just like the U.S. outlawing vehicles after designing its complete freeway system round them.
Therein lies the crux of the issue: On this new generative-AI paradigm, uncertainty reigns over certainty, hypothesis dominates actuality, science defers to religion. The hype round generative AI is accelerating fossil-fuel extraction whereas the know-how consumes unprecedented quantities of power. As Joppa informed me: “This have to be essentially the most cash we’ve ever spent within the least period of time on one thing we basically don’t perceive.”
