Microsoft Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa faced a barrage of pointed questions from the audience Friday during a session at the annual Pacific Northwest Climate Week in Seattle.

Protesters challenged Nakagawa through most of the 30-minute session held in a conference room at Seattle’s City Hall, calling out the company’s use of fossil fuel energy sources to power its AI data centers and challenging Microsoft’s commitment to climate goals set years ago.

As a reporter covering sustainability issues for GeekWire, I moderated the session. Many of the issues raised by the crowd were on my list of questions for Nakagawa. The disruptions also included chants from protesters seated among attendees, at times going beyond climate issues to condemn Microsoft’s technology deals with Israel.

Security guards ultimately ushered some protesters out of the space, while others remained. Interruptions from the audience continued for all but the final 10 minutes of the session.

The event capped off Pacific Northwest Climate Week, which included conversations around the city and region about climate change solutions, policies and innovations.

Microsoft has for many years been viewed as an environmental corporate leader, setting an ambitious goal in 2020 to become carbon negative within a decade. It created an internal carbon tax — one of the corporate world’s largest — that charges individual Microsoft divisions for emissions from sources like air travel to fund climate-friendly initiatives. The company is credited with helping create and sustain the carbon dioxide removal sector, among other roles.

But the rapid expansion of AI data centers and their huge energy demands are undercutting Microsoft’s standing. The company recently released its annual sustainability report, disclosing that its carbon footprint grew 25% last year, moving it further from its 2030 target.

One protester’s question was about a deal announced earlier this year in which Microsoft is partnering with Chevron to build a 2.7 gigawatt natural gas facility to power a data center campus in Texas. I asked Nakagawa how the company defends the agreement, and she pointed to the 4.7 gigawatts of renewable energy that Microsoft has supported in the state. I followed up by asking about the Redmond, Wash.-based company’s commitment to carbon dioxide removal (CDR) projects given recent reports about a pause on new deals.

Nakagawa was unable to answer before the crowd drowned her out with a call-and-response chant: “Microsoft, you can’t hide. We can see your dirty side.”

Another protester criticized the escalating pursuit of AI. “You’re selling us a product that we don’t even need, and we never should ask for,” he said. “No one wants AI. You’re destroying the climate with AI.”

I brought up legislation proposed earlier this year in Washington to mandate clean energy use and bring transparency to data center impacts in the state. Microsoft opposed and helped defeat the bill, though the company says it wants to work with lawmakers to pass rules next year. I asked what needed to change in the legislation for Microsoft to support it.

Nakagawa didn’t provide specifics, but noted that this year, for the first time, the company shared facility-level information in its annual report on electricity and water use for data centers worldwide.

“People want to know more about the data, and we believe you can have an honest and candid conversation with transparency and access to that information and data,” she said.

Given the obvious public concerns, I asked Nakagawa, “Do you really honestly believe that by 2030, the company can hit that carbon-negative goal?”

Nakagawa pointed to wide-ranging initiatives that are starting to help curb specific emissions, including investments to make Xbox devices lower carbon and financial support for the recent opening of a production plant in Moses Lake, Wash., for sustainable aviation fuel company Twelve.

“There are a couple areas where we’re seeing a lot of promising progress,” she said. “Look, this is going to be a hard target. We’ve not been at all shying away from the fact that this is a difficult goal.”

One of Amazon’s top cloud leaders will be joining Meta as the Facebook parent company considers turning its massive AI buildout into a cloud business of its own.

That’s the report from the Wall Street Journal overnight, quoting anonymous sources saying that Dave Brown, the senior Amazon executive who led AWS compute and AI services, will join Meta in the coming weeks to work on its data center build-out.

Meta hasn’t committed to becoming a cloud provider, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the idea is on the table. He told shareholders in May that companies were regularly approaching Meta to pay for access to its AI models or spare computing capacity — a business that would put Meta in competition with cloud providers it now relies on, including AWS.

At Meta, Brown will report to infrastructure chief Santosh Janardhan, according to the WSJ report. Janardhan co-leads Meta Compute, an initiative Zuckerberg launched in January to plan the company’s data center buildout. Meta has said it expects to spend $125 billion to $145 billion on capital expenditures this year, much of it tied to AI data centers.

Amazon isn’t commenting on the report. We’ve contacted Meta for confirmation and details.

Brown’s departure from AWS was announced on Wednesday, with a warmly worded message from AWS CEO Matt Garman giving no indication that Amazon would try to challenge or restrict his new role on competitive grounds.

AWS has gone to court before to enforce noncompete agreements against departing executives, suing two AWS leaders who left for Google Cloud in 2019 and 2020, respectively. But such agreements have grown harder to enforce. California bars them almost entirely, and Washington — Amazon’s home state — enacted a near-total ban this year, though it doesn’t take effect until mid-2027.

Garman’s message said Brown had decided to take “a new role outside of the company” but did not say where he was going. He’s remaining at AWS through the end of July to help with the transition.

At AWS, Brown will be succeeded by Dave Treadwell, a longtime Amazon executive who has run the technology behind the company’s retail operations and spent 27 years at Microsoft before joining Amazon in 2016. He takes over AWS Compute and ML Services on Aug. 1.

Microsoft has just four more years to reach its ambitious goal of removing more planet-warming carbon that it produces. But the company’s annual sustainability report, released Thursday, shows it’s moving in the opposite direction, as its 2025 emissions spiked 25% over the previous year.

Despite the troubling increase, Microsoft leaders say they remain committed to the longer-term goal.

“We continue to really be focused around carbon negativity by 2030,” said Melanie Nakagawa, chief sustainability officer, in an interview with GeekWire.

The Redmond, Wash.-based company is the latest tech giant to fall further behind its climate targets as they invest billions of dollars in new, energy-hungry data centers to power the AI boom. Amazon’s carbon footprint jumped 16% last year, while Google’s greenhouse gas emissions swelled 18%.

The report also shows how much energy use drove that increase, with Microsoft’s total electricity consumption growing by 24% last year.

In total, Microsoft produced 20 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2025, which would have been roughly 34 million metric tons without carbon reducing initiatives including purchasing clean electricity and sustainable fuels, Xbox console efficiency and Surface device decarbonization. The reduced number puts the company’s footprint roughly on par with the total emissions of Panama or Lithuania.

In addition to data center expansion, Nakagawa said, the carbon increase was also driven by Microsoft’s decision to stop buying unbundled, short-term renewable energy certificates, or RECs — a mechanism companies can use to quickly lower their reported emissions for a given year. Microsoft is instead prioritizing longer-term initiatives with bigger impact, she said.

The challenge Microsoft wants to answer, she said, is how to take a “portfolio approach” that spans carbon dioxide removal, carbon-free electricity, sustainable materials, and fuels — addressing all of them together rather than in isolation.

Where Microsoft made gains

The annual report highlighted areas of success. That includes:

• Matching its electricity consumption worldwide with clean energy sources.
• For the first time, replenishing more fresh water globally than it withdrew, making important progress on its 2030 goal of being water positive across operations.
• Achieving 92% reuse and recycling of decommissioned cloud servers and components for the second consecutive year.
• Reaching a total of 40 gigawatts of clean power purchase agreements across 26 countries, with 19 gigawatts currently online. (Forty gigawatts is roughly enough power to serve 30-40 million typical U.S. homes at once.)

Scrutiny over recent moves

Microsoft’s sustainability disclosures come after a series of announcements and news reports that have raised concerns among climate advocates.

• Last month, Microsoft and Chevron announced an agreement to build a natural gas facility in Texas with a 2.67 gigawatt capacity, providing dedicated electricity to the tech company for 20 years.
• In May, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft was considering scaling down or scuttling a pledge to match its electricity use with carbon-free power around the clock by 2030.
• In April, the New York Times reported that Microsoft was pausing future purchases of carbon removal credits, after years as the market’s top buyer.

Nakagawa said the company has not canceled any removal projects, though she did not provide specifics about new purchases going forward. “We’re just continuing to take a hard look at each of the deals that are coming through,” she said, and looking for “credible opportunities to scale.”

Asked about Microsoft’s commitment to purchasing clean energy 24/7 — an approach that would eliminate reliance on coal- or gas-powered energy when wind and solar aren’t available — Nakagawa declined to confirm it. “We still are looking towards opportunities around carbon-free electricity,” while focusing on the 2030 carbon negative goals, she said.

As to the natural gas deal, the chief sustainability officer said Microsoft has also contracted to purchase 4.7 gigawatts of renewable power in Texas alone and that the company evaluates its energy investments as part of a broader mix.

Looking for efficiencies elsewhere

Even as data centers remain the prime driver of Microsoft’s rising energy use and emissions, the company points to other steps aimed at reducing the environmental footprint of the facilities.

That includes increasing the use of lower-carbon steel and concrete and incorporating mass timber into data center buildings. And In the past year, Microsoft has added a seventh Circular Center — one of several facilities worldwide where the company recycles and reuses electronics from data center operations.

Microsoft is also working with developers to use AI models more efficiently and build right-sized products. AI agents can review, test and improve code so it uses less energy when it runs, Nakagawa said.

“I definitely think there’s an opportunity here,” she said.

Editor’s note: A correction was made regarding Microsoft’s total energy use last year, replacing a data point on Scope 2 emission, and clarifying the steps taken to reduce its carbon emissions to 20 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.