Amazon Partners with Orbital Materials to Pilot AI-Designed Carbon Removal Technology in Data Centers

Amazon teams up with Orbital to remove CO2 from the air at one of its datacenters | TechCrunch

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.

Amazon to pilot AI-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 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 venture arm among others, after helping lead materials science work for Alphabet's DeepMind until 2022. (Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; editing by Diane Craft)

Amazon to pilot AI-designed material for carbon removal

Dec 2 (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O), opens new tab 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), opens new tab venture arm among others, after helping lead materials science work for Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab DeepMind until 2022. Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; editing by Diane Craft Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Suggested Topics:Carbon MarketsSustainable MarketsClimate ChangeClimate Solutions Jeffrey Dastin Thomson Reuters Jeffrey Dastin is a correspondent for Reuters based in San Francisco, where he reports on the technology industry and artificial intelligence. He joined Reuters in 2014, originally writing about airlines and travel from the New York bureau. Dastin graduated from Yale University with a degree in history. He was part of a team that examined lobbying by Amazon.com around the world, for which he won a SOPA Award in 2022.

Amazon to pilot AI-designed material for carbon removal

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.

Amazon com : Orbital Materials and AWS enter strategic partnership to develop and pilot technologies for data center decarbonization and efficiency

Princeton, NJ- Dec 2 2024 - Today, Orbital Materials(Orbital), a company that uses its proprietary AI platform to incubate new advanced materials and climate technologies, and Amazon Web Services(AWS), an Amazon.com company, have announced that they have entered into a multi-year partnership to use AI to develop new data center decarbonization and efficiency technologies. AWS will work with Orbital to utilize its proprietary AI platform to design, synthesize and test new technologies and advanced materials for data center-integrated carbon removal, chip cooling and water utilization. Orbital will pilot its integrated data center carbon removal technology by the end of 2025. Developing new advanced materials has traditionally been a slow process of trial and error in the lab. Orbital replaces this with generative AI design, radically improving the speed and efficacy of materials discovery and new technology commercialization. Its first product is a carbon removal technology utilizing a proprietary active material. Since establishing its lab in the first quarter of 2024, Orbital has achieved a 10x improvement in its material's performance through the use of its AI platform - an order of magnitude faster than traditional development and breaking new ground in carbon removal efficacy. "Our partnership with AWS will accelerate the deployment of our advanced technologies for data center decarbonization and efficiency. Working with the market-leading AWS team will ensure that our suite of products in cooling, water utilization and carbon removal enables the next generation of data centers powering the AI revolution." - Jonathan Godwin, CEO of Orbital Materials. Orbital's market-leading open-source AI model for simulating advanced materials, 'Orb', will be generally available for AWS customers via Amazon SageMaker JumpStartand AWS Marketplace. This marks the first AI-for-materials model to be on AWS platforms. Orb will enable AWS customers working on advanced materials and technologies, like semiconductors, batteries, and electronics, to access market-leading accelerated R&D within a secure and unified cloud environment. As part of the collaboration, Orbital will pre-train and fine-tune its frontier Foundation Models on Amazon SageMaker HyperPod, a purpose-built infrastructure for distributed training at scale. It will also evaluate deploying AWS's custom silicon, Trainium, to improve cost performance for its Deep Learning workloads. "AWS looks forward to collaborating with Orbital and their mission to drive data center decarbonization. Through Amazon SageMaker HyperPod and AWS Trainium, we can accelerate the development of breakthrough sustainability technologies. By integrating Orb with Amazon SageMaker JumpStart and AWS Marketplace, we will enable sustainable innovation more widely. Together, we have the opportunity to set new benchmarks for carbon removal and efficiency across the industry." - Howard Gefen, General Manager of AWS Energy & Utilities About Orbital: Launched at the end of 2022, Orbital Materials (Orbital) is leveraging AI to accelerate and redefine the discovery, testing, and deployment of advanced materials and climate technologies. Traditional methods of discovering these technologies have long relied on time-consuming trial and error processes in the lab, often resulting in years of experimentation before success is achieved. By leveraging its proprietary AI technologies at its advanced materials R&D facility in Princeton, Orbital designs, synthesizes and deploys end-to-end climate technologies quicker than possible with human input alone. About Amazon Web Services: Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 108 Availability Zones within 34 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Millions of customers-including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies-trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

AWS details materials science collaboration with Orbital Materials - SiliconANGLE

AWS details materials science collaboration with Orbital Materials Amazon Web Services Inc. is launching a technical collaboration with Orbital Materials Inc., a startup that uses artificial intelligence to discover new materials. The companies detailed the initiative today against the backdrop of the cloud giant's AWS re:Invent conference. It's described as a multiyear collaboration. The goal, the companies said, is to develop technologies and materials that will make it possible to operate data centers in a more sustainable manner. "Our partnership with AWS will accelerate the deployment of our advanced technologies for data center decarbonization and efficiency," said Orbital Materials co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Godwin. The company raised a $16 million funding round in February that included the participation of Toyota Ventures. About a month ago, it secured an investment of undisclosed size from Nvidia Corp.'s NVentures. Orbital Materials says that its AI-centric approach to developing new materials makes it possible to carry out research more efficiently than with legacy methods. It's pursuing its work using an internally developed AI system called LINUS. According to the company, researchers can enter a set of properties that a new material should possess and the system automatically comes up with potential formulas. After LINUS proposes a material, Orbital Materials studies its suitability using a second AI system called Orb. The latter software can map out a material's energy properties, the behavior of its molecules and other features. The company says Orb is more accurate and five times faster than competing AI models. If a proposed material shows promise, it synthesizes it at its Princeton, New Jersey research facility. The first product it has developed through this process is a carbon removal technology based on a "proprietary active material." The company says that its researchers have improved the material's performance by a factor of ten since February. As part of the collaboration with AWS, Orbital Materials will develop materials and technologies for "data center-integrated carbon removal." It will also work on products that can help optimize chip cooling and water utilization. Cooling accounts for a significant percentage of data centers' water and power usage. The partnership will see Orbital Materials collaborate with AWS in several areas. The startup made Orb, the AI model it uses to evaluate new materials, available under an open-source license in September. AWS will make the model available to its customers through AWS Marketplace and Amazon SageMaker Jumpstart. The latter offering provides preconfigured AI software that can be deployed with a few clicks. AWS sees customers applying Orb lends to materials research projects in several fields. Semiconductors, batteries and electronics are among the products that can be developed with the help of the software. Orbital Materials, for its part, will develop its future AI models using the Amazon SageMaker HyperPod service. The offering provides preconfigured AI clusters that remove the need for customers to set up machine learning infrastructure manually. Additionally, SageMaker HyperPod automates cluster maintenance tasks such as recovering from hardware failures.