AI’s surging power demand has put several big tech firms at risk of blowing through their climate commitments. But Amazon has partnered with Orbital, an AI startup, to test a new material that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — and they’re using an AWS datacenter as a first site. 

One of carbon capture’s biggest costs is generating enough airflow so that the sorbent material can withdraw a meaningful amount of carbon dioxide. Datacenters seem an obvious place to deploy such a technology since their cooling systems move massive amounts of air to keep thousands of servers running at optimal temperatures. 

Orbital Materials’ deal with AWS will place its material at a yet-unnamed datacenter. The setup should remove more carbon dioxide than the electricity used by the datacenter would produce, and the extra cost of the material should be far less than the price of a carbon offset. 

The startup specializes in using AI to design advanced materials; Orbital’s models can generate a range of possible materials, including for batteries, semiconductors, and other electronics. But for now, it’s specializing in carbon capture. The material that’s going to be used by AWS was designed specifically to work with the hot air coming out of datacenters. The company declined to disclose further details about the proprietary compound.

Orbital isn’t the first to pair carbon capture with datacenters. Both Alphabet and Meta hold patents related to the technology, and startup 280 Earth is working on the problem as well.

So why aren’t all new datacenters equipped to capture carbon? For one, it’s not free. There’s the material cost, of course, and any filtration system will increase the resistance within the cooling system, increasing the amount of energy it needs to run. Then companies need to figure out what to do with the carbon they capture. All of that needs to cost less than carbon offsets that companies can buy on the open market. 

But if the cost is low enough, on-site carbon capture is appealing for several reasons. For one, there’s no middleman to take a cut, as is often the case in carbon markets. Plus, the amount of captured carbon is much easier to verify. And if datacenters do end up capturing more carbon dioxide than they generate, Amazon and other companies can sell the credits themselves, turning the system into a profit center.