The Cloud’s fearsome five renewable energy strategies: Coupling sustainable development goals with firm specific advantages

Abstract

Abstract Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, the fearsome five of cloud computing, have committed to providing their data centers with renewable energy. In so doing, this paper argues that their strategies are fulfilling two main Sustainable Development Goals, while demonstrating a new evolution in the relation between firm specific advantages and country specific advantages in understanding foreign direct investment. This paper elaborates an environmental interpretation of the relationships between firm-specific and country-specific advantages to appreciate how the cloud companies have developed and globally diffused new firm-specific advantages inspired by the Sustainable Development Goals. The analysis compares the evolution of these ‘green’ firm-specific advantages in home and host countries, supporting the idea of multinational enterprises as pro-active institutions in the global economy.