Research — March 12, 2025

Corporate PPA leaderboard – Microsoft leap cuts into Amazon lead

Big Tech led a 66% surge in clean energy capacity contracted by US corporations in the 12 months to February 2025 — a reminder of the critical role played by the private sector in advancing the energy transition amid decarbonization policy uncertainties in Washington, DC.

The top 10 US corporate offtaker leaderboard highlights the significant role of major AI-backing corporations in carbon-free power procurement. Respectively ranking first through fourth, hyperscalers Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc. (Google) increased their combined green energy portfolio by more than 69% during the interval under consideration, overall procuring over 84 GW as of Feb. 6, 2025 — 98.7% of the total tracked for nonutility US businesses.

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Amazon remains the clear leader of the corporate procurement charts, with nearly 35 GW of clean energy contracted, up 36.5% year over year. The global online retailer and cloud services provider has secured clean energy capacity in 24 markets around the world based on tracked corporate power procurement announcements, but 68.4% of the contracted capacity is with projects based in the US. Most of the remainder is with energy plants in Europe, with Spain-based projects representing 42.8% of this subset.

Microsoft logged the largest annual increase, expanding its carbon-free energy portfolio by nearly 264% to 19.9 GW. Microsoft's deal with Brookfield Renewable Corp. for 10.5 GW of renewable energy capacity alone accounted for almost 73% of the increase. The 10.5-GW procurement will be distributed across the US and Europe and is expected to come online between 2026 and 2030, aligning with Microsoft's goal to achieve round-the-clock zero-carbon electricity consumption by 2030.

Download the 2025 corporate carbon-free energy report and its Excel companion.

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With 30 additional deals tracked during the period under review, Meta was the second most active US corporation across the corporate clean energy space, trailing only Amazon. Twenty-eight of these deals were for solar energy, with most of this photovoltaic capacity contracted with projects based in the southern, generally highly insolated latitudes of the US, across states including Georgia, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas.

Of note, forays into nuclear energy procurement were a major differentiator for Amazon and Microsoft from February 2024 through February 2025. In March 2024, Amazon announced the acquisition of a datacenter directly powered by a nuclear facility — the Susquehanna Nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. The online retail and cloud services giant secured 960 MW of nuclear energy capacity through the transaction.

Six months later, Microsoft and Constellation Energy Corp. reached a deal for a 20-year power purchase agreement for 835 MW of nuclear energy capacity. The deal entails restarting unit 1 at the Crane Clean Energy Center Project (Three Mile Island), in southeastern Pennsylvania. Three Mile Island was the site of a partial meltdown in 1979. Undamaged unit 1 was retired about six years ago.

 

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Data visualization by Chris Allen Villanueva
.This article was published by S&P Global Market Intelligence and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.
For wholesale prices and supply and demand projections, see the S&P Global Market Intelligence Power Forecast. 
Regulatory Research Associates is a group within S&P Global Commodity Insights.
S&P Global Commodity Insights produces content for distribution on S&P Capital IQ Pro.
Adam Wilson contributed to this article.