Meta left a decade-old clean-energy pact. The replacement is 7.5 gigawatts of new gas.

Meta left the RE100 corporate clean-electricity pledge this week after roughly a decade of membership. Over the same period, the company funded construction of at least a dozen new natural-gas power plants, including a 7.5-gigawatt cluster of ten plants around its Hyperion data center in Louisiana. By TechCrunch's count, that portfolio alone generates as much electricity as the state of South Dakota uses.

The reason is how Meta's climate accounting works.

Natural gas burns cleaner than coal. It still produces significant emissions, and it is not renewable in the sense the word usually carries: no wind, no sun, no replenishable flow. Meta's stated position, attributed to a company spokesperson by TechCrunch, is that the company matches its data-center electricity usage "with 100% clean and renewable energy." The word "matches" is the load-bearing one. Matching is a separate accounting claim from "powered by."

The mechanism is the corporate clean-electricity contract. A company can sign a long-term power-purchase agreement for a new solar or wind farm elsewhere on the grid, claim the renewable attributes, and keep running its data center on whatever the local utility delivers in the same hour. Coal one minute, gas the next, solar when the sun is up. The match is on paper, not on the wire. The RE100 corporate initiative, run by the Climate Group, was built to standardize that unit of account across more than 440 member companies. Apple, and Microsoft remain in the pact. Meta no longer does.

The buildout behind Meta's exit is concrete. A 200 MW on-site gas plant in Ohio was announced in June of last year, built specifically to power a single Meta data center. Three large Louisiana gas plants for the Hyperion data center followed about two months later, per Natural Gas Intel. Seven more Louisiana plants for the same project were announced in April and tracked in federal permitting filings. Together those ten Hyperion-area projects total 7.5 GW. The matching-promise math is what lets that gas fleet sit behind a public claim of 100% renewable matching.

The Climate Group recently tightened RE100's reporting guidance to require more rigorous progress updates, and the nonprofit did not respond when asked about Meta's departure. Recharge News first reported the exit; TechCrunch confirmed it with Meta, which called the split mutual. The new reporting standard is the first to be tested on a hyperscaler-scale defector, and Meta is the first major cloud company to leave while peers stay.

The next time a hyperscaler publishes a "100% clean by 2030" headline, the unit of account is the load-bearing word. The number is real. The accounting is what the number is real of: a contract, a megawatt-hour of renewable attributes, a piece of paper filed against a gigawatt of new gas. Whether that is "clean" depends on which definition of clean the reader is using.