Amazon to pilot AI-designed material for carbon removal

Satoshi Holdings Co

02/12/2024 13:00

By Jeffrey Dastin
       Dec 2 (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc  AMZN.O  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 on Monday.
    In a twist, AI 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 AI -- a fraction of carbon offsets'
price, Godwin said.
    At the same time, data centers are requiring more energy to
sustain AI'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 AI 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 AI, Godwin said. The startup aims
to work with AWS to test still-more 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 among others, after
helping lead materials science work for Alphabet's  GOOGL.O 
DeepMind until 2022.

 (Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; editing by Diane
Craft)
 ((Jeffrey.Dastin@thomsonreuters.com; +1 424 434 7548;))