[AI] Review updates in Microsoft sustainability report for CY2024

[adrianco]

Outline Action Item Details

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/sustainability/report/

Issue dependency with other WGs Groups

No response

[adrianco]

Leading the charge: Advancing
standards, tools, and best practices
for sustainable software
Since co-founding the Green Software Foundation
(GSF) in 2021, Microsoft has built a trusted ecosystem
of people, standards, tooling, and best practices for
creating and building green software. As a steering
member, Microsoft has collaborated extensively
with other industry leaders and developers on
open-source projects to make key advancements,
from contributions to standards like the Real Time
Energy and Carbon Standard for Cloud Providers,
Transforming Organizations for Sustainable Software,
and the Software Carbon Efficiency Rating, to
developing tools like the Impact Framework,
Azure Importer, and Organizational Maturity Matrix.
Microsoft also offers leadership within working groups
like the Green AI Committee. Microsoft’s contributions
have been essential, offering expertise, use cases, and
strategic applications to these projects.
In 2024, within the GSF, we particularly focused on
adoption of the SCI specification as an internationally
recognized ISO standard. This specification defines
a methodology for calculating the rate of carbon
emissions for a software system. SCI helps users
and developers make informed choices about
which tools, approaches, architectures, and services
they use by accounting for energy efficiency,
hardware efficiency, and carbon awareness of
software applications.

[adrianco]

There is no data in the report for Azure regions for 2024.
The datacenter fact sheets were last updated in Dec 24 and contain no data (they used to contain data for 2022)
The sustainability blog does not have any updates with data.

[mrchrisadams]

Sigh, this is kind of tired to piece together data this way:

https://news.microsoft.com/source/emea/2025/07/microsoft-will-open-datacenter-region-in-austria

The total energy consumption of all Microsoft datacenters will be covered 100 percent by carbon free energy purchases by the end of 2025. In Austria, Microsoft is working with VERBUND to utilize Austrian hydropower from the Mayrhofen/Tuxbach and Freudenau power plants.

OK, on this basis it might make sense to update the numbers, but we'd need someone to clarify if this means all regions or just regions in Austria.

Maybe we can get someone at Microsoft to share this data in a usable format - if they press releases like this, it would reall help to have claims substantiated with data.