Advancing low-carbon materials
Melanie said: “With our US$1bn Climate Innovation Fund, we’re investing to hasten the development and deployment of new climate innovations, especially for underfunded sectors and supply-constrained markets like lower-carbon building materials.”
She added: “For example, we are investing in solutions such as H2 Green Steel to expand market supply of near-zero carbon steel, which can deliver up to 95% lower CO2 emissions than conventional steel. We are also evaluating use of near-zero carbon steel in our own building materials and equipment supply chains.”
Melanie said Microsoft is also working to broaden the availability of low-carbon concrete and other construction materials.
The work includes, in Washington state, a pilot program that “utilises concrete alternatives like biogenic limestone and fly ash and slag” to reduce the embodied carbon in concrete by more than 50%. compared to traditional concrete mixes.
Improving energy efficiency of AI and cloud services
Melanie said this is a “critical component of the solution”, adding: “We’re working to support developers and IT professionals with tools to optimise models and code, exploring ways to reduce the energy requirements of AI and harnessing the power of these advanced technologies to drive energy breakthroughs.”
She said Microsoft is empowering developers to build and optimise AI models that can get the same results with fewer resources.
“Over the past few months, we’ve released a suite of small language models (SLMs) called Phi that achieve remarkable performance on a variety of benchmarks, matching or outperforming models up to 25x larger.”
Melanie added: “Our ambitious 2030 targets to become carbon negative, water positive, zero waste and to protect biodiversity require continued innovation across every aspect of our operations, and we’re committed to sharing what we learn along the way.”
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