Mastodon is looking to grow its open source, decentralized social network with new features aimed at creators.

A look at the partnerships and investments Google announced at the AI Impact Summit 2026.

AI isn’t just helping people solve problems faster, it’s unlocking new possibilities for discovery and scalability. To support organizations at the forefront of scientif…

In 2020, Microsoft announced a moonshot commitment to become carbon negative by 2030 — accelerating work across our company to advance the partnerships and technologies needed to advance sustainability for our businesses, our customers and the world. A key milestone on this journey was our aim to match 100% of our annual global electricity consumption with renewable energy(1) by 2025. Today, we are pleased to share that Microsoft has achieved this milestone(2). This progress helps drive investment into the power systems where we operate, expand clean energy supply and advance broader energy innovation.

Over a decade of investment: 40 gigawatts of new renewable energy contracted

What began in 2013 with a single 110 megawatt (MW) power purchase agreement (PPA) in Texas — a small first step to demonstrate how corporate procurement could scale clean energy(3) — has evolved into one of the largest clean energy portfolios in the world. This first deal not only supported Microsoft’s early cloud services but also set in motion a decade of commercial partnerships and learning-by-doing that served to demonstrate how corporate demand for advanced energy solutions can help to achieve a more affordable and sustainable power system, while supporting reliability for customers.

Since our carbon negative announcement in 2020, we have contracted 40 gigawatts (GW) of new renewable energy supply across 26 countries, working with more than 95 utilities and developers across 400+ contracts and counting. To put that amount in perspective — that’s enough energy to power about 10 million US homes. Of that contracted volume, 19 GW are now online, delivering new clean energy supply to the power grid, while the remainder are slated to come online over the next five years.

Our new renewable energy procurement continues to deliver significant environmental benefits, including the reduction of Microsoft’s reported Scope 2 carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 25 million tons(4) and the mobilization of billions of dollars’ worth of private investment in regions where we operate.

Catalyzing market investment through bankable, repeatable models

Microsoft is among the early pioneers in developing technical and commercial practices that help advance bankable, repeatable and scalable procurement tools suitable for each market. Our clean energy purchasing navigates a global patchwork of power market designs, requiring creativity in how we balance cost, time to market and project sizing in our portfolio across planning, contracting and management.

Our work has benefited from a broad coalition of partners helping to build this market together. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, more than 200 global corporations collectively purchased nearly 200 GW of clean energy around the world since 2008. Working alongside other clean energy buyers — as well as hundreds of utilities, manufacturers, financiers, developers and engineers — we have helped reduce transaction costs, expand developer access to financing and streamline procurement approaches that other buyers can adopt.

This global flywheel of partnership, investment, technology and policy innovation is expected to continue to facilitate billions of dollars’ worth of investment into infrastructure and jobs. And as we’ve seen repeatedly, when Microsoft sends a clear market signal for world-class, first-of-a-kind technologies and infrastructure, the power sector rises to the challenge. Our procurement over the past decade has demonstrated that partnerships, communities and innovation are essential ingredients that help to accelerate first-of-a-kind technologies and infrastructure at scale.

Scaling partnerships to scale infrastructure

Critical to Microsoft’s success in expanding digital infrastructure and supporting our local communities is our ability to build trusted partnerships with the over 95 global energy suppliers that support our clean energy portfolio. We have sourced clean energy through multiple requests for proposal or information, bilateral engagements and clean tariffs to evaluate over 5,000 unique carbon-free energy projects around the world.

Today, Microsoft has six energy company partners with which we have over 1 GW of contracted renewable energy capacity, and more than 20 energy supplier partners where each partner has at least five separate renewable energy projects with Microsoft — evidence of the durable, repeatable relationships necessary to scale clean energy. Combining scale with speed, Microsoft’s landmark 10.5 GW framework agreement with Brookfield sends a long-term, 2030 demand signal to the market that enables developers to raise funding more efficiently, bolster supply chains, hire engineers and construct world-class energy infrastructure.

Putting communities first

Our renewable energy procurement has mobilized billions of dollars in private investment, supported thousands of jobs across the communities where we operate and delivered meaningful co-benefits. Through partnerships with developers and nonprofit organizations, we’ve worked to embed community-driven benefits into our energy portfolio. These benefits include robust infrastructure, economic inclusion and support for community-focused organizations.

Our support for communities shows up in projects like our 500 MW PPA with Sol Systems, or our 250 MW PPA with Volt Energy Utility that provided local training and jobs, as well as grants to community nonprofit organizations and habitat restoration. We’ve also signed over 1.5 GW of distributed solar, bringing clean energy directly into hundreds of communities around the world. Landmark agreements like our 500 MW offtake with Pivot Energy, or our 270 MW offtake with PowerTrust are expected to foster employment, energy cost savings and grid resilience in communities across the United States, Mexico and Brazil. More details on the above examples and our approach to community benefits in clean energy agreements can be found in a dedicated Microsoft whitepaper.

Innovation unlocks new markets and pathways

Microsoft’s clean energy procurement continues to play an important role in catalyzing technical, commercial and regulatory innovation. Our commercial efforts have helped lower barriers to entry into new markets and expand access into multi-technology contracts that accelerate decarbonization.

In Japan, Microsoft signed one of the first corporate PPAs in the country’s restructured power market. Our 25 MW, 20-year agreement with Shizen represents the first single-asset virtual PPA executed in the country, which helped pave the way to over 2GWs of corporate procurement since 2024, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Alongside opening new markets, we have structured several multi-technology offtakes in nascent markets for corporate procurement. In India, Microsoft purchased a combined 437 MW solar/wind hybrid offtake from Renew, where our projects will support energy access and rural electrification. In Microsoft’s home state of Washington, our datacenters in Douglas County are supplied by 100% carbon-free energy, as we leverage a creative blend of new wind power and hydropower storage to deliver around-the-clock clean energy.

Looking forward to 2030 and beyond

In 2025, the International Energy Agency (IEA) described a new “Age of Electricity,” marked by accelerating electricity demand from electric vehicles, air conditioners, data centers and heat pumps. As the world electrifies more of the economy, the demand for affordable, reliable and clean electricity will continue to rise.

Our experience building Microsoft’s clean energy portfolio both reflects and furthers global trends. According to IEA data, since 2000, renewable energy generation has expanded nearly four-fold. In many power markets across the world, clean energy is one of the fast-growing sources of generation, and often the one with the fastest time-to-market. Corporate buyers like Microsoft continue to serve as an important catalyst in driving commercial demand for innovation and infrastructure across the power industry.

As we continue our journey toward becoming carbon negative by 2030, Microsoft will continue to push for an expansive focus on adding all forms of carbon-free electricity solutions, complementing and adding to our portfolio of renewable energy resources. We recognize that the world’s rising electricity needs require a balanced, all-of-the-above decarbonization strategy to meet global economic growth and environmental goals, and our sustainability goals will continue to support this approach moving forward. Such a strategy requires a broader set of carbon-free energy and grid-enabling technologies, including nuclear energy, next-generation grid infrastructure and carbon capture technology. Just as renewable energy was a relatively small part of global energy grids in 2013 when we signed our first PPA, today many advanced energy technologies remain early in their development but offer significant promise to accelerate progress towards an affordable, reliable and sustainable energy future.

Microsoft has already taken early steps to support the advancement of a broader set of carbon-free energy technologies as we partner with Helion and Constellation Energy on a 50 MW fusion project in Washington state and work with Constellation to restart the 835 MW Crane Clean Energy Center in Pennsylvania. Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund has allocated $806 million of capital to 67 investees, with 38% directed toward Energy Systems — advancing carbon-free power and fuels, energy storage and energy management solutions.

We welcome continued collaboration with our power sector partners to bring these innovations to market and incorporate new technology tools in the process to accelerate their development.

We will continue to build and leverage new AI-driven tools to design, permit and deploy new power technologies that help expand and more efficiently operate the electricity grid, bringing more clean energy online faster. This work is exemplified by our recently announced collaborations with Idaho National Laboratory and the Midcontinental System Operator, among other examples.

And as we advance innovative energy technologies, we recognize that standards must evolve alongside innovation. That is why we will continue participating in industry forums that strengthen carbon accounting frameworks — so that our clean energy procurement is measured with greater accuracy and delivers real world emissions reductions, with a continued focus on maintaining the high level of integrity that the world has come to expect from Microsoft.

Our carbon negative commitment remains a call to action — for Microsoft, our customers and the broader technology sector — to invest in an affordable, reliable and sustainable power system. As we look toward 2030, that call to action has never been clearer.

Gratitude — and momentum for the work ahead

Today’s milestone represents a shared achievement among the utility professionals, clean energy developers, community leaders, technology innovators and forward-thinking policymakers who continue the deployment of renewable energy. Meeting today’s milestone shows what partnership can deliver in bringing big ideas to life. The future of carbon-free energy is one that we will create – together.

As Microsoft’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Melanie Nakagawa leads the company’s targets to be carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste by 2030. She brings deep experience at the intersection of policy, business, and technology to advance climate and sustainability solutions globally.

As President of Cloud Operations + Innovation at Microsoft, Noelle Walsh leads the organization that powers the global Microsoft Cloud. She oversees the company’s physical cloud infrastructure and operations, with a charter focused on safety, security, availability, sustainability, and competitive infrastructure growth—bringing decades of global operational leadership.

Footnotes

1. Renewable energy is defined within Microsoft’s fact sheet https://aka.ms/SustainabilityFactsheet2025, which represents FY24 data.
2. To date, Microsoft’s renewable energy target includes two primary categories: renewable energy from contracted projects and grid mix. The first is renewable energy delivered under PPAs or similar long-term contracting mechanisms, generally for new projects where our financial involvement in the project’s development is critical for its success. This category represents more than 90% of the renewable energy applied to achieve our 2025 target.The second category is “grid mix” – renewable energy supported via our standard utility relationships and rates, inclusive of policy programs such as renewable portfolio standards and state and utility decarbonization goals.Our 2025 100% renewable target does not include purchases from short-term, so-called “spot market” renewable energy credits (RECs) sourced from operational clean energy projects.With the above in mind, Microsoft leverages a straightforward formula to determine our 100% renewable energy metric on a global, annual basis. We update and further detail the methodology and assumptions behind this formula in our annual sustainability reports:
3. Clean energy— also referred to in this blog as carbon free energy —is defined within Microsoft’s fact sheet https://aka.ms/SustainabilityFactsheet2025, which represents FY24 data.
4. Reduction of reported Scope 2 emissions are calculated between FY20-25, the cumulative difference between location based and market-based emissions, excluding the use of short-term, so-called “spot market” RECs

The post A milestone achievement in our journey to carbon negative appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Long-term preservation of digital information has long challenged archivists and datacenters, as magnetic tapes and hard drives degrade within decades. Existing archival storage solutions have limited media lifespans that make them less than ideal for preserving information for future generations.

Now, we are excited to report significant progress on Project Silica (opens in new tab), our effort to encode data in glass using femtosecond lasers, a technology that could preserve information for 10,000 years. Glass is a permanent data storage material that is resistant to water, heat, and dust.

In findings published in Nature (opens in new tab), we describe a breakthrough that extends the technology beyond expensive fused silica to ordinary borosilicate glass. A readily available and lower-cost medium, this is the same material found in kitchen cookware and oven doors. This advance addresses key barriers to commercialization: cost and availability of storage media. We have unlocked the science for parallel high-speed writing and developed a technique to permit accelerated aging tests on the written glass, suggesting that the data should remain intact for at least 10,000 years.

Storing data inside glass with femtosecond (opens in new tab) laser pulses is one of the few technologies on the horizon with the potential for durable, immutable, and long-lived storage. Although we have been leading innovation in this type of storage for years, prior to this research the technique only worked with pure fused silica glass, a type of glass that is relatively difficult to manufacture and available from only a few sources.

In the paper, we show how data can be stored in borosilicate glass. The new technique stores hundreds of layers of data in glass only 2mm thin, as with previous methods, but with important improvements. The reader for the glass now needs only one camera, not three or four, reducing cost and size. In addition, the writing devices require fewer parts, making them easier to manufacture and calibrate, and enabling them to encode data more quickly.

Key scientific discoveries

The Nature paper details several key new scientific discoveries:

Advances in birefringent voxel (opens in new tab) writing: For the previous type of data storage in fused silica glass using birefringent (i.e., polarization) voxels, we developed a technique to reduce the number of pulses used to form the voxel from many to only two, critically showing that the polarization of the first pulse is not important to the polarization of the voxel formed. We further developed this to enable pseudo-single-pulse writing, in which a single pulse can be split after its polarization is set to simultaneously form the first pulse for one voxel (where the polarization doesn’t matter) and the second pulse of another (where the set polarization is essential). We demonstrated how to use this pseudo-single-pulse writing to enable fast writing with beam scanning across the media.

Phase voxels, a new storage method: We invented a new type of data storage in glass called phase voxels, in which the phase change of the glass is modified instead of its polarization, showing that only a single pulse is necessary to make a phase voxel. We demonstrated that these phase voxels can also be formed in borosilicate glass and devised a technique to read the phase information from phase voxels encoded in this material. We showed that the much higher levels of three-dimensional inter-symbol interference in phase voxels can be mitigated with a machine learning classification model.

Parallel writing capabilities: By combining a mathematical model of pre-heating and post-heating within the glass with the invention of a multi-beam delivery system, we showed that many data voxels can be written in proximity in the glass at the same time, significantly increasing writing speed. We explained a method for using light emissions (a side effect of voxel formation) for both static calibration and dynamic control to fully support automatic writing operations.

Optimization and longevity testing: We developed a new way to optimize symbol encodings using machine learning and a better way to understand the tradeoff between error rates, error protection, and error recovery when evaluating new digital storage systems. We also created a new nondestructive optical method (opens in new tab) to identify the aging of data storage voxels within the glass, using this and standard accelerated aging techniques to support data lasting 10,000 years. We extended the industry standard Gray codes to apply to nonpower-of-two numbers of symbols.

Demonstrating the technology

As a research initiative, Project Silica has demonstrated these advances through several proofs of concept, including storing Warner Bros.’ “Superman” movie on quartz glass (opens in new tab), partnering with Global Music Vault (opens in new tab) to preserve music under ice for 10,000 years (opens in new tab), and working with students on a “Golden Record 2.0” project (opens in new tab), a digitally curated archive of images, sounds, music, and spoken language, crowdsourced to represent and preserve humanity’s diversity for millennia.

Looking ahead

The research phase is now complete, and we are continuing to consider learnings from Project Silica as we explore the ongoing need for sustainable, long-term preservation of digital information. We have added this paper to our published works so that others can build on them.

Related work

Project Silica has made scientific advances across multiple areas beyond laser direct writing (LDW) in glass, including archival storage systems design, archival workload analysis, datacenter robotics, erasure coding, free-space optical components, and machine learning-based methods for symbol decoding in storage systems. Many of these innovations were described in our ACM Transactions on Storage publication (opens in new tab) in 2025.

Opens in a new tab

The post Project Silica’s advances in glass storage technology appeared first on Microsoft Research.

I had the chance to attend this year’s Pragmatic Summit and catch Laura Tacho – CTO at DX, executive advisor, and Austrian Innovator of the Year – in her keynote.

She presented her latest research, Measuring Developer Productivity & AI Impact, based on three months of data collected through February 1.

The research surveyed 121.000 developers across 450+ companies. A striking 92.6% of them use an AI coding assistant at least once a month, and roughly 75% use one weekly. Clearly, AI isn’t just a side experiment anymore, it’s part of the workflow.

Here are the top takeaways I found most compelling from Laura’s research.

The 10% productivity plateau

The first thing most people think of with AI assistance is saving time. According to the research, developers say they’re saving about 4 hours a week – pretty much the same as Q2 2025, with Q4 2025 numbers sitting around 3.6-3.7 hours.

It looks like the time-saving boost has leveled off. Productivity shows the same pattern: it jumped around 10% when AI first took off, and since then, it’s stayed steady at that level.

What’s really shifting is the amount of “AI-authored code” – that is, code that gets merged into the main repository or production environment with little to no human intervention. Laura breaks this down using the latest data:

Looking at about 4.2 million developers between November 2025 and February 2026, AI-authored code now makes up 26.9% of all production code – up from 22% last quarter. Daily AI users are also hitting a milestone: nearly a third of the code they merge, which passes review and goes into production, is written by AI.

One example Laura loves to highlight is how AI is speeding up the onboarding process:

Looking at the data quarter by quarter, from Q1 2024 through Q4 2025, onboarding time has been cut in half. Specifically, we’re measuring it by the “time to the 10th Pull Request (PR).”

This metric (widely seen as a key sign of successful onboarding) has now been cut in half. Because of that, Laura sees AI as a powerful tool for getting people up to speed, whether it’s new hires, engineers switching projects, or even non-engineers stepping into technical workflows.

The faster someone gets up to speed, the longer the productivity boost lasts, usually for at least two years. This points to a bigger trend: AI is helping developers get up to speed faster, reducing mental load, and making it easier to onboard into complex codebases.

In struggling organizations, AI exposes flaws instead of fixing them

Laura also pointed out a part of the research that looks at how AI impacts company performance. This segment analyzed data from 67.000 developers between November 2025 and February 2026, and the findings are strikingly divided.

Some companies are dealing with twice as many customer-facing incidents, while others see a 50% drop.

The difference comes down to how AI is used: in well-structured organizations, AI acts as a “force multiplier,” helping teams move faster, scale with higher quality, and boost reliability. In struggling organizations, AI tends to highlight existing flaws rather than fix them. Based on this, Laura concludes:

Transformation is uncomfortable. Organizations that were ready to quit their cloud or agile transformations are now giving up on AI transformation, too. It’s difficult to look at an entire organization and realize that something fundamental must change to see a real impact on the bottom line.

According to her, adoption alone doesn’t guarantee results, just using the tools doesn’t automatically improve an organization:

This is really a management problem. The hype made it sound like just trying AI would automatically pay off. But so far, most tools have been used for individual coding tasks. To see real impact, we need to use AI at the organizational level, not just for single tasks.

Laura also touched on the most popular AI tools among developers, specifically highlighting Codex:

The Codex desktop app launched on February 2 and has already topped one million downloads, with a 60% growth rate just last week. They recently rolled out GPT-5.3 Codex. Inside OpenAI, 95% of developers use Codex, and those users submit roughly 60% more Pull Requests each week.

As a real-world example, Laura highlights Cisco, where 18.000 engineers use Codex daily for complex migrations and code reviews. This has cut their code review time in half. But Laura cautions that AI won’t fix deeper organizational issues unless you tackle those problems head-on, and that starts with acknowledging they exist.

Since organizations remain constrained by human and systemic friction, Laura notes:

I am skeptical of any technology’s promise to improve performance without addressing those underlying constraints. If we don’t solve our systemic issues, we’ll just “carry them into space with us.” The real question isn’t how to colonize Mars, but how to achieve actual organizational impact.

DevEx is more important than ever

To wrap things up, Laura revealed the secret to success for those who are “winning” with AI:

1. They set clear goals and measure results.

2. They recognize that Developer Experience (DevEx) matters more than ever.

3. AI succeeds when factors like fast Continuous Integration (CI), clear documentation, and well-defined services are in place.

At the end of the day, getting real organizational results means treating AI as a company-wide challenge. The research shows the barriers aren’t technical, they come down to change management and leadership support. Laura sums it up:

Successful organizations experiment by tackling real customer problems. Exploring Mars sounds exciting, but it’s not sustainable – it’s expensive and distracts from the core business. Focus your experiments on the customer to drive meaningful results. After all, somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be discovered.

The post This CTO Says 93% of Developers Use AI, but Productivity Is Still 10% appeared first on ShiftMag.