Microsoft’s greenhouse gas pollution increased by roughly 25 percent last year, the company says in its new sustainability report released Thursday.

The report follows similar ones released by Google and Amazon last week. Together, they show a troubling trend of rising tech company emissions, driven by the global race to build out power-hungry data centers.

In a blog post announcing the report, Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith and chief sustainability officer Melanie Nakagawa say that the emissions increase is driven “primarily by the expansion of our datacenter infrastructure.”

A significant portion of that increase, they write, was tied to emissions from energy the company purchased or acquired to run its operations. Known as Scope 2 emissions, that greenhouse gas pollution accounted for 13 percent of Microsoft’s total.

Data centers, which use large amounts of energy running artificial intelligence chips, have pushed many large tech companies’ net-zero goals increasingly out of reach over the past few years.

Amazon disclosed a 16 percent increase in its CO₂ emissions in its recent sustainability report. Google said in its new sustainability report that annual greenhouse gas emissions rose 18 percent last year compared to 2024, the biggest single-year increase it’s recorded. The company has aggressively invested in renewable energy, but it’s also begun adding foss...