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Amazon has inked a new partnership to turn data centers into carbon capture machines, offsetting the harmful effects of the massive amounts of energy required to run them.
Amazon Web Services is partnering with startup Orbital Materials, which used artificial intelligence to create a new material specifically designed for separating carbon from hot air exhaust in data centers, the companies announced Monday.
Orbital Materials CEO Jonathan Godwin said he expects its new technology to capture enough carbon to exceed the fossil fuel consumption used to power AI data centers, providing a net negative impact on climate change. The process will cost less than purchasing captured carbon to offset its climate impact, according to Godwin.
The system, part of a pilot program at a to-be-determined data center location, works when outside air is sucked in and used to cool extremely hot semiconductors designed to run or train powerful AI models, such as Anthropic’s Claude chatbot.
The idea of using the cooling mechanisms in data centers to also power direct air carbon capture has been gaining steam in recent years, with both Alphabet and Meta also devoting R&D spending to the endeavor.
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Data centers that power generative AI models require more electricity and generate more heat than the kind that simply run websites or databases.
They are equipped with specialized chips, such as Nvidia’s graphics processors, or GPUs, that crunch numbers at breathtaking speeds.
As demand increases for these new AI tools, some worry that AI data centers will drive up the price of electricity and lead to more consumption of fossil fuels. This is increasingly concerning as companies pack more processing power into single data centers, often called “clusters,” requiring more complicated engineering to cool the chips.
Cooling mechanisms are designed to pull heat away from the chips and blow the hot air out of the data center. Materials known as “sorbents” can absorb carbon dioxide as air passes over them. But the air exiting the data centers reaches higher temperatures than the air in traditional direct air capture methods. So, Orbital Materials used an AI model to predict what kinds of molecular structures would serve as sorbents more suited to absorb hotter air, and then tested several possibilities in a lab in New Jersey.
Once separated from the air, the carbon can be stored underground as a gas (if the local geology is suited for it) or turned into a solid, like cement, and shipped elsewhere. Godwin said Orbital’s AI models are being used by companies to search for new materials that could improve everything from batteries to semiconductors.
Godwin co-founded the company after working on materials science at Google’s leading AI division, DeepMind.
Materials science is a new AI research area, where companies like Meta, Microsoft and others have also shown promising results.
Reed’s view
Direct air capture at data centers seems like a no-brainer. It can also be used to draw water out of the air, which can then be used in the cooling process.
We’ve also seen data center exhaust used to heat homes, and there are probably a myriad of other emerging use cases that could make an impact.
The Orbital Materials story is a perfect illustration of the relationship between AI and efforts to curb climate change and advance science.
Orbital’s purple molecule is one small but promising step in the right direction. The next step is to create even more novel and impactful materials.
The holy grail would be nuclear fusion, where the intense heat in the reactor destroys just about every known material. If fusion reactors could arrive this decade instead of the next, it would make a drastic difference in the fight against climate change.
But even new battery technology would be an enormous climate breakthrough. Cheaper and more reliable batteries would enable a much wider use of solar power, which is also benefiting from materials science breakthroughs like perovskite.
These are very difficult problems, but these small breakthroughs are reason to be optimistic.
However, these challenges need more funding from both the federal government and the private sector.
Room for Disagreement
There’s a lot of skepticism about direct air capture, including in this article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “Separating carbon dioxide from air, while technically straightforward, is outrageously expensive,” the authors wrote. “In fighting climate change, the obvious question should always be: How can we avoid the most carbon dioxide per dollar invested?”