Big Tech Will Not Save Us From the Climate Crisis

On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that Microsoft may delay or abandon its clean energy targets. This comes less than a month after Microsoft indefinitely paused its purchases of carbon removal credits, a struggling industry the company helped create as part of its “moonshot” goal to match 100 percent of its energy with renewables by 2030. Now, it may abandon this goal completely. The reason for its reversal? Microsoft’s hunger to build more and bigger data centers to power its artificial intelligence (AI) is incompatible with its ability to source renewable energy.

Microsoft’s embrace and subsequent retreat from its commitments highlights the flimsiness of the ‘solutions’ Big Tech pushes to pacify our demands for livable communities, clean air, and drinkable water – and the dangers we face when we rely on their promises. The technologies are unproven, the companies’ initiatives are voluntary, and the longevity of their commitments are guided only by the whims of their leaders.

Before the latest news about Microsoft, their facade was already showing cracks. In early 2025, Microsoft issued an update on its progress towards its moonshot goal; due to AI’s energy needs, the company has “had to acknowledge that the moon has gotten further away.” The same update, though, claimed that AI would soon “begin to rapidly accelerate climate solutions at a scale we’ve not yet seen.” It’s ironic that a year later, AI is causing the company to delay or renege on its renewable energy goal altogether. Now we know the alleged AI climate solutions are not coming to fruition.

Here in South Jersey, we are all too familiar with the impacts of Big Tech’s big greenwashing claims. To supply Microsoft, developers are currently building South Jersey’s first hyperscale data center in Vineland, the city I grew up in, which represents the diverse ecology and communities of our state. Without our input, DataOne and Nebius, Microsoft’s on-the-ground partners, are ramming through operations that are keeping neighbors awake at night, and which may slowly poison our air beyond relief. Their proposed facility will be as large as the Empire State Building, consuming enough energy to power Vineland two times over.

With a facility this size, we are worried about the health of our air and ecosystems. Microsoft’s contractors claim they will capture pollutants from the data center’s methane gas powerplant through “algae based biofilters,” a “breakthrough” technology, which might as well be a euphemism for “untested.” The theory is that fast-growing genetically engineered microalgae will be able to hold the pollutants emitted by the data center’s 32 on-site gas generators that it will use for round-the-clock power. But this technology is hypothetical, and has never been built to scale. Unfortunately, we now know that Microsoft’s investments—allegedly meant to rehabilitate its impacts on air and water quality—are revocable at any time, and the technologies may not bear fruit before Microsoft disinvests.

The developers point to a 'closed loop system' to reassure us about water consumption, but the term is potentially misleading. In typical configurations, only the inner cooling loop is sealed, while heat is rejected through evaporative cooling towers that can lose millions of gallons to the air. Vineland's own water department previously estimated the facility could consume over 1.1 billion gallons per year. DataOne now claims the number will be far lower thanks to capturing water from the facility's exhaust—a promise that it appears to be asking the community to take on faith.

It’s not just water that we are concerned about. The microalgae technology they’re using is particularly dubious—the company deploying it onsite (marking Vineland as a“laboratory”) intends to release whatever CO₂it manages to capture by converting it into hydrocarbon fuels that release the captured CO₂ when combusted, potentially making the system a net-polluter while my community is promised the emissions will be captured.

Oil and gas companies have marketed—and then disinvested from—algae biofuels as a climate solution before. Big Tech is taking a page out of Big Oil’s playbook with its algae-to-fuel claims in Vineland, and its complicity in the climate crisis does not end there. In fact, through our community’s grassroots organizing and research, we learned that Big Tech corporations, and especially Microsoft, have long been egregious enablers of the oil and gas industries, providing advanced technologies to help oil and gas corporations extract more through “enabled emissions.” In response to activism from communities like ours fighting back against data center sprawl, the corporations have become even savvier with their PR.

Public campaigns touting carbon capture and storage and other speculative solutions we think of as “false solutions to the climate crisis” are just one tool Big Tech uses to fleece our communities, starting with our elected officials. In Vineland, our government notably sided with the data center’s developers—not asking the hard questions that would protect constituents. Vineland’s local government is offloading blame for the project to others, while our City Council approves loans and even as community members are threatened with lawsuits for asking questions about conflicts of interest. Our Mayor has notably little to say. Politicians have encouraged us to “look at the positives” despite hundreds of public comments opposing the development and documented issues with data centers in other states. Escalating concerns to our state representatives are ignored, while data center developers publicly thank them for their support in making the project happen.

The data center’s proposed emissions, already confused for the public with claims about microalgae and other false solutions, were never presented to our community forthrightly, so it has taken months of public record requests to uncover the details. Over time, we noticed multiple technical deficiencies regarding the developers’ air quality permit with the state. Sharing our questions and concerns online has raised awareness to the project itself, and we have been educating our community members and local organizations to inoculate them against big tech’s climate claims.

I have lived in Vineland my whole life, and I have worked for developers in our region. I have seen how they operate: act first, and then ask for forgiveness or pay a fine later. Microsoft and its data center developers are displaying the same behavior here in Vineland. Distressingly, their misleading claims here are part of a larger trend. To address growing concerns about Big Tech’s climate impacts, corporations are throwing their might behind dangerous technologies, like nuclear power; outlandish ones, like data centers in space; and deceptive ones, like artificial intelligence itself as a climate solution. What Big Tech is not doing is investing at adequate scale in the real solutions we know could solve our problems, like wind and solar energy combined with data center development that moves at a scale and speed that can account for communities’ needs first. Big Tech and data center developers have no incentive to engage seriously with these practices while they can use false solutions to distract from the costs of doing business as usual.

Vineland is an agricultural community, and we deserve to decide how our land and water is used. It is also a community already wrought with environmental justice hazards, and we deserve solutions that address the inequities past projects have perpetuated. And Vineland is a diverse community—as farmers, service workers, and concerned citizens, we deserve to decide who builds in our backyard.

Our fight exemplifies Big Tech’s burgeoning efforts to greenwash their data center projects, and serves as a warning to other communities organizing against them. No matter what tech CEOs say in shiny advertisements and in closed-door meetings with politicians, Big Tech will not solve the climate crisis.