They all joined a coalition in 2017 that eventually became America Is All In, a group of leaders from states, cities, businesses and beyond that has vowed to help the United States achieve its promised emissions reductions. Facebook and Microsoft even submitted climate action plans that outlined their proposals for reducing carbon emissions.
In 2020, Microsoft shocked corporate America when it made a “carbon negative” commitment for the end of the decade, promising to remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it emits. Apple, Google and Facebook all followed with more modest carbon neutrality pledges for 2030.
The next year, Joe Biden became president and immediately rejoined the Paris Agreement, making climate action a pillar of his administration. When the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022, providing hundreds of billions of dollars for climate and clean energy projects, many tech companies redoubled their efforts to cut their carbon pollution.
At the same time, the giants of Silicon Valley were pouring billions of dollars into developing AI applications — and the data centers and energy infrastructure needed to run them. Microsoft’s emissions have jumped 29 percent since the company announced its carbon negative pledge in 2020. Google’s emissions have soared by 67 percent over the same period.
“As we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging due to increasing energy demands from the greater intensity of AI compute, and the emissions associated with the expected increases in our technical infrastructure investment,” Google said in its 2024 environmental report.
Silicon Valley sours on Biden
While many technology firms welcomed Biden’s climate policy, they sharply differed with him on other issues that are central to their profitability. Biden’s appointees took a hard line against tech consolidation — doubling down on antitrust lawsuits that Trump’s agencies had originally filed against Google and Facebook, and bringing new cases against Apple and Amazon, while probing Microsoft and the chipmaker Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company.