Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) plans to pilot a new carbon-removal material for its data centers, a move aimed at mitigating the growing environmental impact of artificial intelligence systems. The innovative substance, designed by AI, comes from the startup Orbital Materials.
“It’s like a sponge at the atomic level,” said Jonathan Godwin, Chief Executive of Orbital Materials. “Each cavity in that sponge has a specific size opening that interacts well with CO2, that doesn’t interact with other things.”
The new material offers potential cost advantages. Godwin explained that it adds approximately 10% to the hourly charge for a GPU chip used in training powerful AI, a fraction of the cost of carbon offsets.
Data centers are facing increasing energy demands to support AI development, as well as heightened water consumption for cooling. This presents a challenge for companies like Amazon, which has committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s largest cloud-computing provider by revenue, will begin piloting the material in one data center in 2025. This initiative is part of a three-year partnership with Orbital, which also includes AWS technology access for Orbital and the availability of Orbital’s open-source AI for AWS customers.
Howard Gefen, general manager of AWS Energy & Utilities, stated that the partnership would promote sustainable innovation. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed by Godwin.
Orbital, which operates in Princeton, New Jersey, and London, established a lab about a year ago to synthesize substances simulated by its AI. The startup is seeking to collaborate with AWS to test additional AI-generated materials to address water use and chip cooling in data centers.
Godwin co-founded the 20-person company, backed by Radical Ventures and Nvidia’s (NVDA.O) venture arm, after leading materials science work for Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) DeepMind until 2022.
Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; editing by Diane Craft
