GoKawiilThe company has said that it is not permanently ending its carbon removal purchases (though it didn’t directly answer further questions about this apparent pause). But with this flurry of news, there’s a lot of fear in the industry—so, it’s worth talking about the state of carbon removal, and where Big Tech companies fit in.
Carbon removal aims to reliably pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and permanently store it. There’s a wide range of technologies in this space, including direct air capture (DAC) plants, which usually use some kind of sorbent or solvent to pull carbon dioxide from the air. Another important method is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), in which biomass like trees or waste-derived biofuels are burned for energy, and scrubbing equipment captures the greenhouse gases.
There was a huge boom of interest in carbon removal technologies in the first half of this decade. One UN climate report in 2022 found that nations may need to remove up to 11 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year by 2050 to keep warming to 2 °C above preindustrial levels.
One nagging problem is that the economics here have always been tricky. There’s a major potential public good to pulling carbon pollution out of the atmosphere. The question is, Who will pay for it?
So far, the answer has been Microsoft. The company is by far the largest buyer of carbon removal contracts, and it’s the only purchaser that has made megatonne-scale purchases, says Robert Höglund, cofounder of CDR.fyi, a public-benefit corporation that analyzes the carbon removal sector. “Microsoft has had a huge importance, especially for getting large-scale projects off the ground and showing there is demand for large deals,” Höglund said via email.
Microsoft has pledged to become carbon-negative by 2030 and to remove the equivalent of its historic emissions by 2050. Progress on actually cutting emissions has been tough to achieve though—in the company’s latest Environmental Sustainability Report, published in June 2025, it announced emissions had risen by 23.4% since 2020.