This month, we take a closer look at Google and Salesforce, two contrasting buyers whose approaches to the voluntary carbon market reveal very different paths to the same goal, from a small, high-cost portfolio pushing the frontier of permanent removals to a high-volume, quality-led program now taking its first steps into that same removals frontier. Combining AlliedOffsets data with wider research, we explore how their VCM activity, credit preferences, and decarbonization strategies have developed over time.
Google has been a fixture of the voluntary carbon market since 2008, making it one of the longest-tenured corporate buyers AlliedOffsets tracks. Across 1,200 transactions over 18 years, it has retired 320,469 credits from 48 distinct projects, while holding 24 tracked forward offtake agreements, part of an estimated $30 million in total transaction value. That gap between a relatively modest retirement figure and a much larger offtake book is telling, like Amazon's approach to forward-purchasing, Google's carbon strategy leans heavily toward locking in future supply rather than retiring at scale today.
Its weighted average price paid per credit sits at $70.31, considerably above typical VCM pricing, and its combined retirement and offtake activity (2.56 million credits) splits almost evenly between avoidance/reduction (51.5%) and removals (48.5%), a notably higher removals share than most corporate buyers carry. By project type, renewable energy and waste disposal lead the portfolio, but a meaningful share sits across emerging removal pathways, including biochar, enhanced rock weathering, and bio-other technical removals.
The average age of Google's retired credits has climbed steadily over time, from under 2 years for its earliest purchases to 8-9 years for recent vintages, a sign of a portfolio that has increasingly leaned on older, more established project types as it has matured. Its average normalized retirement quality score of 0.6 places it toward the more credible end of the market, and around two-thirds of its retired credits are classed as neutral reputational risk, with a smaller share flagged as higher risk given the scrutiny that comes with Google's public profile. Google is also an RE100 member, tying its credit purchasing to a wider clean electricity commitment, though unlike Schroders it does not currently hold a formal SBTi or Net Zero Transition target, leaving less public clarity on how carbon credits fit into its own science-based decarbonization pathway.
Where Google's carbon strategy is defined by a small, expensive, removals-heavy portfolio, Salesforce sits at almost the opposite end of the spectrum. Since entering the market in 2015, Salesforce has retired 2,323,588 credits across 66 projects, over seven times Google's retirement volume, at a weighted average price of just $10.88 per credit, a fraction of what Google pays. It's a strategy built on scale and breadth rather than pushing the frontier of removal technology.
Salesforce's quality profile also compares favourably: 58.92% of its retired credits are classed as "no risk," nearly six times Google's equivalent share. Forestry and land use dominates the portfolio at 46.65%, followed by renewable energy (26.95%) and chemical processing (13.95%), and the offset mix skews heavily toward avoidance and reduction credits (roughly 80% combined) over removals (20%), a far more conventional, nature-based approach than Google's near-even removals split. Salesforce is also, unlike Google, both SBTi and Net Zero Transition committed, giving it a more clearly defined formal decarbonization pathway than its counterpart in this month's spotlight.
What makes Salesforce's story interesting isn't just its scale in the established market, though, it's the direction it's now heading. Despite a portfolio built almost entirely on avoidance and forestry credits over the past decade, Salesforce joined Frontier's $915 million Growth AMC expansion this month, its first participation in the coalition's advance market commitment for permanent carbon removal. For a buyer whose retirement history has leaned so heavily on nature-based avoidance, stepping into a removals-specific vehicle alongside Google, Stripe, Shopify, and H&M Group marks a meaningful shift in strategy, less a wholesale pivot than a deliberate first step toward diversifying a mature, high-volume portfolio into more durable, technical removal pathways.