Big Tech’s eco-pledges don’t slow its pursuit of Big Oil

Employee activism and outside pressure have pushed big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google into promising to slash their carbon emissions. But there’s another thing these tech giants aren’t cutting: Their growing business ties to the oil and gas industry.

When Microsoft held a staff meeting in September, an employee asked CEO Satya Nadella whether it is ethical for the company to be selling its cloud computing services to fossil fuel companies, according to two other Microsoft employees who described the exchange on condition they not be named. Such partnerships, the worker told Nadella, were accelerating the oil companies’ greenhouse gas emissions.

Microsoft and other tech giants have been competing with one another to strike lucrative partnerships with ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and other energy firms, in many cases supplying them not just with remote data storage but also artificial intelligence tools for pinpointing better drilling spots or speeding up refinery production.

The oil and gas industry is spending roughly $20 billion each year on cloud services, which accounts for about 10% of the total cloud market, according to Vivek Chidambaram, a managing director of Accenture’s energy consultancy. It’s not yet clear whether the extraction industry is getting its money’s worth, although experts remain bullish about the application of advanced technology to oil and gas exploration.

Nadella sought to assuage employee concerns at the Sept. 12 meeting, first by reiterating Microsoft’s own efforts on environmental sustainability, according to the workers, who asked for anonymity because they feared retaliation for speaking about an internal meeting. The employees said Nadella also defended Microsoft’s energy partners, pointing out their investments in researching and developing more...