One Microsoft data center in West Virginia could raise the company’s emissions 44%: report

Microsoft’s use of 1.35  gigawatts of processing power in West Virginia will be entirely powered by emissions-producing natural gas.

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Microsoft’s recently announced use of a West Virginia data center that will run entirely on natural gas could cause the company’s emissions to skyrocket by 44%.

That’s according to a new report from Stand.earth researchers, who say Microsoft’s power needs at the facility will see it burning the same amount of methane as annually as more than 1.2 million homes.

The data center, called the Monarch Compute Campus, is an example of a “behind-the-meter” or “off-grid” data center, which generates its own electricity, bypassing the public grid. 

With the growth of AI data centers threatening to overload the electricity grid and raise residents’ energy bills, these sorts of projects have been praised for avoiding those effects. Though they don’t directly affect the power grid in their areas, natural gas-powered data centers still carry hefty environmental toll.

What is the Monarch Compute Campus?

Technically, the Microsoft doesn’t own the data center it will be using. As of last week the 2,250-acre Monarch Compute Campus is owned by Nvidia-backed cloud computing startup Nscale.

Nscale buys AI processors, installs them in data center servers, and then leases those processors to AI developers, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Microsoft signed a letter of intent in mid-March to lease 1.35 gigawatts of AI computing capacity (via Nvidia chips) from the Monarch Compute Campus. 

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