Microsoft said it will use 50 percent renewable energy to power its data centers worldwide by 2018 and will reach the 60 percent level by the early 2020s.
The announcement, according to Computerworld, was made at the Verge 16 conference last week. Microsoft has run its global operations completely on renewables since 2014. The story points to a blog posted last week by Rob Bernard, the company’s chief environmental and cities strategist, that explains some of the ways in which the target will be met. It includes increased use of the cloud to cut public transportation fuel consumption and solar power.
The Albuquerque Journal reported last week that another prodigious user of data centers, Facebook, is building a datacenter in Los Lunas, New Mexico.