Amazon to Pilot A.I.-Designed Material for Carbon Removal
(Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc. plans to pilot a new carbon-removal material for data centers, which are at risk of worsening emissions from artificial intelligence systems they power, a startup behind the deal said.
In a twist, A.I. itself, from the startup Orbital Materials, is what designed the carbon-filtering substance, its Chief Executive Jonathan Godwin said.
"It's like a sponge at the atomic level," Godwin told Reuters. "Each cavity in that sponge has a specific size opening that interacts well with CO2, that doesn’t interact with other things."
Potential cost-savings are partly the draw. The new material adds up to an estimated 10% of the hourly charge to rent a GPU chip for training powerful A.I. — a fraction of carbon offsets' price, Godwin said.
At the same time, data centers are requiring more energy to sustain A.I.'s development and more water to keep them cool. That poses a challenge to companies like Amazon, which has committed to have net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.
Its unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is the world's largest cloud-computing provider by revenue. It is piloting the novel material in one data center to start in 2025 as part of its three-year partnership with Orbital, Godwin said. The agreement also provides for Orbital to use AWS technology and to make its open-source A.I. available to AWS customers.
Howard Gefen, general manager of AWS Energy & Utilities, in a statement said the partnership would encourage sustainable innovation. Godwin declined to state the financial terms.
Orbital, which has operations in Princeton, New Jersey and London, set up a lab about a year ago to synthesize substances that had been simulated by its A.I., Godwin said. The startup aims to work with AWS to test still-more A.I.-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 venture arm among others, after helping lead materials science work for Alphabet's DeepMind until 2022.
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