Microsoft faces potential vote: Shareholders curious about its plans to tackle emissions

Trillium Asset Management wants Microsoft to explain how it will meet its 2030 greenhouse gas (GHG) emission targets, and is backing a shareholder proposal to request this information at the firm’s next shareholder meeting.

The cloud and software biz set itself lofty environmental goals back in 2020, aiming to be become "carbon-negative" by 2030, and to have removed the equivalent of all the carbon it has ever emitted by 2050.

But since the start of the decade, an explosion in AI development and demand for ever more complex models has seen a boom in demand for high-performance compute infrastructure and a construction wave to deliver new datacenters to house it all in.

Microsoft is one of the firms to profit from this huge demand, with its cloud division making $214.4 billion in revenue for the fiscal year 2026 ended June 30, a 27 percent year-on-year increase.

This has also caused Microsoft’s emissions to head in the wrong direction, with figures …