The growing demand for electricity for AI has put several large tech companies at risk of not meeting their climate protection commitments. But Amazon has partnered with Orbital, an AI startup, to test a new material that absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – and they’re using an AWS data center as their first site.
One of the biggest costs of carbon capture is creating enough airflow to allow the sorbent material to remove a significant amount of carbon dioxide. Data centers seem like an obvious place to deploy such technology, as their cooling systems move huge volumes of air to keep thousands of servers at optimal temperatures.
Orbital Materials’ agreement with AWS involves the deployment of its materials in an as-yet unnamed data center. The installation should absorb more carbon dioxide than the electricity used by the data center, and the additional cost of the material should be much less than the price of carbon offsets.
The startup specializes in using artificial intelligence to develop advanced materials; Orbital’s models can generate a range of possible materials, including those for batteries, semiconductors, and other electronics. But for now, the startup specializes in carbon capture. The material that AWS is going to use has been designed specifically to work with hot air coming out of data centers. The company declined to disclose further details about the patented compound.
Orbital is not the first to combine carbon capture with data centers. Both Alphabet and Meta hold patents for this technology, and 280 Earth, a startup, is also working on this problem.
Why aren’t all new data centers equipped with carbon capture? First, it’s not free. There are material costs, of course, and any filtration system increases the resistance in the cooling system, increasing the amount of energy needed to run it. Companies then need to decide what to do with the captured carbon. All of this should cost less than the carbon credits that companies can buy on the open market.
But if the cost is low enough, on-site carbon capture is attractive for several reasons. First, there is no intermediary to take a cut, as is often the case in carbon markets. In addition, the amount of carbon captured is much easier to verify. And if data centers capture more carbon dioxide than they produce, Amazon and other companies can sell the credits themselves, turning the system into a profit center.
