Zuckerberg has since tried to assure Meta’s left-leaning employees that the company is holding true to its values, but in an all-hands meeting in January, he stated plainly, “We now have an opportunity to have a productive partnership with the United States government, and we’re going to take that.”
The question now is just where Meta’s climate goals will fit in this partnership.
Since taking office, President Trump has used executive orders to pause tens of billions of dollars in environmental and energy spending and stop all new wind energy permits from going forward. He has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and declared a “national energy emergency” designed to speed up approvals for energy projects — that is, with the exception of renewable energy projects.
The courts will ultimately decide the fate of these orders. But as Zuckerberg strains to stay in the new president’s good graces, the White House’s fossil fuel boosterism could complicate Meta’s climate commitments. That’s particularly true given that those commitments were already on shaky ground in the midst of the energy-sucking boom in artificial intelligence.
While Zuckerberg has never made climate action his primary cause, in a speech to Harvard graduates in 2017, he did call on the class to join in “stopping climate change before we destroy the planet.” And Meta has worked hard to do its part. Since 2020, the company has achieved net zero emissions throughout its operations, thanks to a combination of renewable energy credits, carbon removal investments, and the direct use of solar and wind energy to reduce its emissions. By 2023, it had the largest renewable energy portfolio of any corporate buyer in the country, and just last year, it struck what it said was a “first-of-its-kind” partnership to power its data centers with geothermal energy.
But beyond accounting for its operational emissions, the company has also committed to achieving net zero emissions throughout its value chain, from the copper wires spiraling through these gargantuan data centers to the construction materials used to build them.
That’s a far more challenging goal, particularly when every AI company is trying to build out their computing capacity as quickly as possible, said one former Meta employee familiar with the company’s climate and energy strategy. (The employee asked to remain anonymous to discuss private matters.) “The fear in the back of people’s minds is someone is going to say: These are voluntary commitments, and we’re just not going to do it anymore,” the former employee said, noting the “herd mentality” of Big Tech. “If one domino falls, do others?”
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on how the company’s climate goals may be impacted by the changing political landscape and didn’t respond to a request for comment about whether this week’s layoffs have impacted sustainability work. But in its most recent sustainability report, Meta acknowledged that meeting its net zero goals by 2030 “will be significantly harder” in the age of AI. “The challenge of reaching our sustainability goals given the increased demand for energy and resources driven by AI is not unique to Meta,” wrote Rachel Peterson, Meta’s vice president of infrastructure for data centers. Indeed, Google and Microsoft have both said they’re falling short of their climate targets, and in 2023 alone, Meta’s own data center energy use spiked 34%. Peterson wrote that this demand “will require major shifts in how companies like ours operate.”
Some of those shifts are already underway. Shortly after the election, Meta issued a request for proposals for nuclear developers with the goal of adding up to 4 gigawatts of new nuclear generation capacity — enough to power a small city — by the 2030s.
Though the company has plenty of apolitical reasons to pursue nuclear power and plenty of company among tech giants investing in the space, it doesn’t hurt that nuclear power is also more politically palatable at this moment. Just last week, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former fossil fuel executive, promised to “unleash commercial nuclear power,” even as he skewered the pursuit of a net-zero future. Wright’s secretarial order made not a single mention of solar and wind power, which make up the bulk of Meta’s renewable energy mix.
Meta’s push into nuclear by no means indicates it’s giving up on wind and solar. A Meta spokesperson pointed me to a new agreement Meta struck last week to purchase 115 megawatts of power from an Oklahoma wind farm. (Google reportedly struck its own wind deal earlier this month in Virginia.) But it does mean Meta is diversifying its energy mix to keep up with AI demand at a time when the federal government is least likely to get in its way.
“There’s been no repudiation of the climate goals,” Benjamin C. Lee, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who was previously a visiting scientist at Meta AI working on data center energy usage, told me. “It’s just that there simply isn’t enough wind and solar, and if you’re looking to build another 100 megawatt data center, you have to get the energy.” (Lee is now a visiting scientist at Google.)
“Energy of any kind trumps no energy,” he added.
That includes energy from natural gas. A few weeks after the election, Meta said it would build its largest data center yet — a 4 million square foot behemoth — in Richland Parish, Louisiana, which will be powered by three new natural gas plants. Meta’s announcement made no mention of the site’s power demands, but instead emphasized how the company planned to offset its impact by investing in community action grants, water stewardship, and adding enough new clean and renewable energy projects to the grid to cover 100% of the data center’s electricity needs.
But Zuckerberg left all of that out of his post about the project on Threads in January. Instead, just days after President Trump announced a new $500 billion AI data center partnership between Oracle, OpenAI, and Softbank, Zuckerberg boasted that “Meta is building a 2GW+ datacenter that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.”
The pandering post signaled a pivot — not necessarily in Meta’s actual plans for the data center, but in its climate-friendly messaging about it. In Zuckerberg’s telling, the data center’s sheer size, not its attempts at sustainability, were the selling point.
Still, despite these rhetorical moves, three people I spoke with who have previously worked at Meta on energy and sustainability issues are doubtful that the company’s substantial investments in renewable energy — particularly solar energy — are going away. That’s largely because solar is still often cheaper than other forms of energy. Even if the political case is diminished, they said, the business case is still there.
But investing in renewables alone won’t get Meta to its ultimate goal. Achieving net zero emissions throughout the value chain requires relying on materials that often do carry a cost premium. And it requires doing that at a time when AI companies are racing to one-up each other by building bigger data centers faster than ever before.
It’s those commitments that appear far more vulnerable, particularly when the White House is offering every excuse for corporate America to give them up. “Net zero was always going to fall by the wayside, but that was because of AI,” said Lee. “The question is whether the gap between what we had hoped to achieve and where we are becomes larger.”
