Google is going all in on carbon-free energy. The cloud giant today pledged to run all of its worldwide data centers and corporate campuses on 100% carbon-free power by 2030. The new pledge builds on the cloud giant's  previous achievement of matching its energy use with 100% renewable energy by 2017. 

CEO Sundar Pichai, in a blog post, called this updated carbon commitment the company’s “biggest sustainability moonshot yet.” To hit the new 2030 carbon-free target, Pichai’s plan is to pair wind and solar power together, increase the use of battery storage, and utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize power demand and forecasting. The new measures will create 12,000 jobs by 2025, he said.

Google has been on the green train since 2007 when it was the first major company to hit carbon-neutral status. And as wildfires continue to shroud the California sun in plumes of smoke, the cloud giant is claiming another first, announcing today that it has offset all of its historical carbon emissions since it first launched in 1998.

The new carbon commitment follows the company’s Earth Day investment in its carbon-intelligent computing platform.

The cloud giant developed the platform to optimize scheduling of compute tasks to run when low-carbon power sources, like wind and solar, are most plentiful. 

“Shifting the timing of non-urgent compute tasks — like creating new filter features on Google Photos, YouTube video processing, or adding new words to Google Translate — helps reduce the electrical grid’s carbon footprint, getting us closer to 24×7 carbon-free energy,” said Ana Radovanovic, Google’s technical lead for carbon-intelligent computing, in a blog post.  

Meanwhile, in other tech giant carbon-free initiatives, Microsoft has been exploring underwater data centers. The Google competitor today retrieved Project Natick, its shipping-container-size data center, from its two-year, 117-foot dive to seafloor off Scotland’s Orkney Islands.  

For every text message, video download, email, or chat sent, there’s a power-hungry server running around the clock in a data center making it happen. And those data centers are pumping out an increasing amount of carbon emissions, which place a heavy burden on our electric grids and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.

Cloud companies like Google and Microsoft boast some of the largest data center footprints in the world. In understanding where the greatest concentration of emissions come from, these cloud giants have identified emission-reduction opportunities that will both reduce their overall emissions and allow them to profit from improved climate performance.

If Google can hit the 100% carbon-free target by 2030 for its entire data center fleet, the company says this will "demonstrate that carbon-free electricity grids are within reach."