Trillium Asset Management wants Microsoft to explain how it will meet its 2030 greenhouse gas (GHG) emission targets, and is backing a shareholder proposal to request this information at the firm’s next shareholder meeting. The cloud and software biz set itself lofty environmental goals back in 2020 , aiming to be become "carbon-negative" by 2030, and to have removed the equivalent of all the carbon it has ever emitted by 2050. But since the start of the decade, an explosion in AI development and demand for ever more complex models has seen a boom in demand for high-performance compute infrastructure and a construction wave to deliver new datacenters to house it all in. Microsoft is one of the firms to profit from this huge demand, with its cloud division making $214. 4 billion in revenue for the fiscal year 2026 ended June 30, a 27 percent year-on-year increase. This has also caused Microsoft’s emissions to head in the wrong direction, with figures from the company’s most recent Environmental Sustainability Report showing that these have increased from 13 million tons of CO 2 equivalent in 2020 to 20 million tons in 2025. However, Microsoft estimates that without the carbon reduction initiatives it has already put in place, emissions would now be much higher, somewhere near 34 million tons. The increase is largely accounted for by indirect emissions (Scope 3) from the construction and provisioning of datacenters to meet that demand for cloud services and AI training. But as The Register pointed out, 2025 saw a growing contribution from Scope 2, due to generation of energy the company purchased. This represents 13 percent of total emissions – up from 2 percent in 2024. Now Trillium Asset Management, financial advisors specializing in sustainable and responsible investing, is urging Microsoft shareholders to vote for Proposal 4 during their annual meeting scheduled for December 8…