Phase 1: Signature collection
November 1, 2026 to December 31, 2026
Phase 2: Letter sent to Microsoft
First week of January 2027
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To the Leadership Team at Microsoft,
We write as your customers. The organisations signing this letter run significant workloads on Azure, Microsoft 365, GitHub and Copilot, and for many of us Microsoft is among our most material technology suppliers. Your environmental performance is not an external matter for us, it sits inside our own Scope 3 emissions, our own regulatory disclosures, and the commitments we have made to our own customers, regulators and investors.
We are writing because Microsoft’s environmental disclosure and current trajectory no longer give us what we need: confidence in you as a supplier, and data we can stand behind in our own reporting.
Microsoft chose to lead. In 2020 it set commitments that defined the standard for the industry: carbon negative, water positive and zero waste by 2030, and the removal by 2050 of all the carbon the company has emitted since 1975. We took those commitments seriously, and we expect Microsoft to hold to them.
Microsoft’s own 2025 Environmental Sustainability Report shows how far the current position sits from that standard. Total emissions are 57 per cent higher in 2026 than the 2020 baseline. Energy use has risen 168 per cent over the same period. Operational emissions, Scope 1 and 2, have fallen by around 30 per cent, but Scope 3 now makes up roughly 97 per cent of the company’s footprint and continues to rise, driven by data centre construction, hardware and the embodied carbon of AI infrastructure. These are Microsoft’s own figures, and they point away from the 2030 goals rather than towards them.
We are asking for specific, verifiable action.
We are not asking for the regulatory minimum, and we are not asking for more polished PR stories. We are asking for specific, verifiable action.
A reply that offers another dashboard built on averaged, market-based, modelled data will not close this gap. We need evidence we can place directly into our own regulated disclosures, not numbers that give false comfort.
Environmental disclosure quality and credible decarbonisation now carry weight in how we select, procure and renew technology. We would rather they weighed in Microsoft’s favour. The strength of our existing relationships is the reason we are raising this with you directly, instead of simply adjusting where we buy. We are giving Microsoft the chance to respond before that calculation settles.
Our request to Microsoft
We ask for a written response within 60 days, and a meeting with the Microsoft leaders accountable for sustainability and for our enterprise accounts. We will track Microsoft’s progress against the asks set out below and share that assessment among the signatories.
We write in good faith, as customers who want Microsoft to deliver what it committed to in 2020. What we need now is straightforward: honest data we can stand behind, and full disclosure where the law requires it. The next step is Microsoft’s.
Our Asks
Reaffirm the 2030 commitments in absolute terms.
Restate the carbon, water and waste targets with dated interim milestones, expressed as absolute reductions and prioritised ahead of carbon credits and removals. Where removals are used, disclose their durability and additionality, and do not present avoidance credits as equivalent to durable removal. Reduction first, offsetting last.
Provide AI-specific environmental metrics.
Report the energy, water and carbon intensity of Microsoft’s AI services at a usable unit, for example per compute-hour and per million tokens, with training and inference reported separately and broken down by region. Customers are being asked to adopt AI at scale, and yet are unable to see the environmental cost of the workloads they run. This makes responsible deployment impossible.
Communicate honestly about AI and sustainability.
Stop presenting AI in general as a sustainability solution. Be clear about where specific deployments deliver a measurable net environmental benefit, and where they raise energy, water and emissions without one. Only use “AI for Good” where it is quantifiable and scientifically validated.
Publish absolute site-level energy and water use.
Alongside key in-life metrics such as PUE and WUE, and the trend in each over time, and demonstrate how much of the demand growth has been absorbed through efficiency and utilisation gains before new capacity and new energy procurement. Clean supply does not excuse uncontrolled demand. Prove that growth is being met with efficiency, not just more capacity.
Publish the embodied carbon of new data center build.
Be transparent about embodied carbon. Scope 3 is the large majority of the footprint, so publish the embodied carbon of new data centre build and hardware, alongside a credible reduction roadmap for concrete, steel, chips and servers. Operational efficiency alone addresses the smaller part of the problem.
Move to hourly, around-the-clock carbon-free energy matching by region.
Match carbon-free energy honestly. Disclose the gap between contracted carbon-free capacity and actual consumption hour by hour. Disclose, too, whether new load draws additional carbon-free generation onto the grid or prompts new fossil capacity to meet it. Microsoft has begun moving away from unbundled certificates and has contracted substantial carbon-free capacity. The next step is to show, grid by grid, what that delivers in practice.
Disclose the physical climate risk of each site.
For every operating and planned data centre region, publish the exposure to water stress, extreme heat, flooding and grid instability, and show how siting decisions account for it. Where our workloads run in climate-exposed locations, that exposure becomes our resilience and continuity problem, not only Microsoft’s.
No new gas projects.
There is a concerning trend towards powering data centers with gas turbines, to avoid wait times for grid connections. A catastrophe for reaching 2030 commitments, the environment and human health. Stop new fossil fuel projects like Project Kilby.
Give customers decision-useful granular environmental data, including:
- Publish per-service metrics for Azure, Microsoft 365, GitHub Copilot and the rest, broken down by region and site, covering carbon, water and material use, and aligned to the GHG Protocol and the ISO/IEC 30134 data centre metrics so that figures are comparable across providers.
- For carbon, provide location-based figures that reflect the actual grid, reported separately from any market-based figure.
- For water, report site-level WUE, with particular attention to sites in water-stressed basins.
- Label measured data distinctly from modelled estimates, provide it in machine-readable form with the methodology stated, and subject it to independent third-party assurance, so that we can rely on it in our own disclosures. Portfolio averages built on market-based, modelled numbers do not meet this ask, because we cannot use them in our own CSRD, SECR and Scope 3 reporting.
Comply with the EU Energy Efficiency Directive in every member state where Microsoft operates.
Disclose where the law requires it, and publish what is disclosed. A single voluntary disclosure visible only in the Netherlands, with operating sites such as the Middenmeer campus absent from regulators’ records while featuring in Microsoft’s own marketing, falls short of what a company of Microsoft’s scale and stated values should provide.
Support the disclosure rules you sell services for.
Microsoft markets CSRD compliance services to its customers. As the EU’s disclosure regime has been weakened through the Omnibus process, and as Microsoft has faced public pressure to refuse compliance, the company has said little in defence of the frameworks it profits from helping others meet. Clarify Microsoft’s position, and support credible mandatory disclosure rather than benefiting from both its existence and its dilution.