In July 2020, we announced our goal to eliminate our dependence on diesel fuel for backup power in our datacenters by 2030. This is in addition to our commitment to having a 100 percent supply of renewable energy procured for our datacenter operations by 2025. Reliable backup power is essential to our customer promise—delivering highly available, reliable, and scalable cloud services. Many critical industries, governments, and institutions depend on the Microsoft cloud to support essential operations, even when events such as extreme weather interrupt the primary energy supply.

Generators at datacenters, most often powered by petroleum-based diesel, play a key role in delivering reliable backup power. Each of these generators is used for no more than a few hours a year or less at our datacenter sites, most often for routine maintenance or for backup power during a grid outage. Diesel fuel accounts for less than 1 percent of Microsoft’s overall emissions, but finding solutions to reduce reliance on traditional diesel fuels represents a substantial contribution to the technology pathways necessary for deep decarbonization. The most immediate opportunity to reduce the use of traditional diesel fuels is to validate and implement alternative, lower-carbon fuel sources for our generators.

As your ally in the cloud, our Azure mission is to deliver thoughtfully designed products and services that equip you to solve challenges and invent what’s next. Our ability to meet your business and innovation needs is in part due to our growth mindset—which extends from front-end user experiences to small details like graphics and icons.

One detail updating today is the Azure “A” icon, which will be rolled out in product experiences and across related sites in the coming weeks. The new Azure icon represents the unity of Azure within the larger Microsoft family of product icons. It’s part of Microsoft’s Fluent Design System, carefully crafted to produce icons that look familiar to what customers know and love, while representing the agile future of our business.

The new Azure product family icon

The constant evolution of the cloud industry—and your business needs—is inspiring. It drives us to deliver products and services that support your growth and adapt to your shifting requirements. Your feedback is priceless for identifying and prioritizing updates. Please let us know what you’d like to see in the future on our feedback forum.

Azure. Invent with purpose.