News this week suggests Microsoft is pausing new carbon removal purchases. The company hasn’t confirmed the news publicly (and reports show they have begun telling both suppliers and partners that the they are pausing future purchases of carbon removal), and we’re not going to speculate on what’s happening in Redmond. What we can say is that Microsoft’s work over the past five years has had an outsized role in building the market. The company created early demand and significant demand, setting a high bar for what credible procurement looks like, and gave dozens of early-stage projects the runway to prove their technology.
But the story the coverage is missing is where demand is actually headed. Governments are now stepping in as direct buyers in addition to being funders of research. The 2026 federal spending law included roughly $116 million for carbon removal, including money to stand up a federal purchasing program in the United States. That’s a different kind of demand than a single corporate buyer, but it’s more durable.
“Microsoft did something few others were willing to do, and the field owes them for it,” said Erin Burns, Executive Director of Carbon180. “But the market they helped build is bigger than any one company now. Congress funded the federal purchasing program this year at more than $100 million. Other governments are moving in the same direction. Private sector purchases have been enormously valuable for early scaling of carbon removal–and they were never going to be enough on their own. We need policy. It’s the only way we’re going to get to gigaton-scale carbon removal that makes a meaningful difference in addressing climate change.”