Data centers are a growing climate problem, especially as all the energy needed to train AI models inflates tech companies’ carbon footprints. A startup that spun out of Google’s “moonshot factory” X says its technology can provide a potential solution. It can pull carbon dioxide out of the air, run partially on servers’ waste heat, and even generate water to help cool a data center more efficiently.
The company, 280 Earth, just signed a $40 million agreement to capture carbon dioxide emissions for some big names through an initiative called Frontier that Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey launched in 2022 to support emerging carbon removal tech. The buyers include Frontier’s founding members as well as Autodesk, H&M Group,…