Meta has left RE100, the voluntary corporate group where companies formally commit to sourcing 100% of their electricity from renewable sources. RE100 is run by the UK nonprofit Climate Group and has over 440 members, including Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Meta joined in 2016 and pledged to be fully renewable by 2020. It missed that target and is now out entirely.
The Climate Group did not mince words. It told reporters that Meta is no longer eligible because of its investments in new gas power. Meta described the departure as mutual and says it remains committed to clean energy. Those two statements can both be true and both be incomplete.
The underlying reason is not complicated. AI data centers need electricity that never stops. A server farm training an AI model does not get a break when clouds cover the solar panels. Grid electricity in most of the US cannot be sourced purely from renewables on demand. So Meta, like Microsoft and Google, has started building its own gas-fired power plants right next to its data centers, bypassing the public grid entirely. This is called behind-the-meter generation.
Meta has now committed to ten such gas plant projects in roughly a year. Its Louisiana data center alone will require enough electricity to match the entire consumption of South Dakota. The scale is what makes this story different from the usual corporate sustainability shuffle.
The paper fix that companies have relied on for years is buying energy attribute certificates, sometimes called RECs or renewable energy certificates. The idea is that if a solar farm produces a unit of clean electricity somewhere, a company burning gas somewhere else can buy a certificate to claim that unit. On paper, the math balances. In practice, the gas still burns and the emissions still enter the atmosphere.
Meta plans to keep using these certificates after leaving RE100. But there is a scale problem. Across the industry, planned non-renewable power capacity grew 71% between 2025 and 2026, while renewable growth in the same period was essentially flat at 2%. The more gas the sector burns, the harder it becomes to offset with certificates without simply inflating the accounting.
Microsoft's own sustainability report, published recently, showed a 25% jump in emissions after it stopped buying a category of renewable certificates it had previously relied on. That number, sitting plainly in the report, shows what the certificates were doing: masking real consumption. When Microsoft removed them, the true picture emerged.
None of this means Meta or its peers are acting in bad faith on AI. The speed at which AI infrastructure is being built has outpaced the energy grid, and natural gas is the only fuel that can be brought online fast enough. Gas turbine orders are now booked out until the early 2030s, with prices expected to nearly triple by end of year compared to 2019.
For business operators outside tech, the story has two practical angles. First, any company that uses big tech suppliers and reports its own carbon footprint under Scope 3 rules, which cover the emissions of your supply chain, should note that the servers running your cloud software are increasingly gas-powered. The clean-energy claims on your vendor's website may not match reality.
Second, corporate green pledges are becoming harder to treat as permanent facts. When AI costs rise, pledges get renegotiated. If your business has signed supply contracts or made procurement decisions partly based on a tech partner's sustainability record, that record is worth re-reading.