Sustainability-in-Tech : Carbon-Removal Material Trialled In Data Centre

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is to pilot a new AI-designed carbon-removal material at one of its data centres as part of a new strategic partnership with AI start-up Orbital Materials.

Why?

As data processing and storage requirements increase, data centres must handle increasingly complex AI workloads, pushing their energy and cooling demands ever higher. AWS, like other operators, has set ambitious carbon reduction targets, but purchasing offsets can be costly and less transparent. In a new move, partnering with Orbital and integrating a new carbon-removal material at an AWS data centre by 2025, the company is aiming to directly remove more CO₂ from its airflow than it produces, potentially at a lower cost than traditional offsets. It’s hoped that this approach will not only help AWS meet its sustainability commitments but also address the escalating operational and environmental pressures driving these changes.

Who is Orbital and What is the AWS Deal?

Orbital, launched at the end of 2022 and led by CEO Jonathan Godwin, operates from facilities in Princeton, New Jersey and London. The start-up uses an AI-driven platform to rapidly discover and test advanced materials for climate-focused solutions (work that would traditionally take years in a lab). According to Amazon’s website, since establishing its research and development lab in early 2024, Orbital has seen a tenfold improvement in its carbon-removal material’s performance, highlighting the revolutionary potential of AI-driven materials discovery.

Through its multi-year partnership with AWS, Orbital will supply a carbon-removal material for integration at an AWS data centre by 2025. The goal is to capture more CO₂ than the facility emits, helping AWS meet its carbon reduction targets and potentially offering a more cost-effective, transparent alternative to traditional offsets.

Carbon Removal at the Source

The principal idea behind the AWS–Orbital collaboration is to use data centres themselves as a platform for direct carbon capture. Data centres rely on vast, sophisticated cooling systems to maintain the optimal temperatures required by the thousands of servers inside. These cooling systems constantly circulate large volumes of air, providing an excellent opportunity to integrate a carbon-removal material that can filter out CO₂ molecules as they flow through.

How Does Orbital’s Carbon Removal Material Work?

Orbital’s CEO, Jonathan Godwin, recently explained the nature of the advanced carbon-removing material it produces, describing it as “like a sponge at the atomic level”. For example, the material’s tiny cavities are sized to interact specifically with CO₂, thereby allowing it to trap the gas while letting other, less harmful components of the air pass freely. By 2025, AWS plans to pilot this cutting-edge carbon-removal technology in one of its data centres, testing its scalability and real-world performance.

A More Cost-Effective Alternative

While some operators resort to carbon offsets to reduce their net emissions, these can be expensive and often involve complex verification processes. By capturing carbon directly from the air at the source, data centres could theoretically bypass intermediaries and reduce their reliance on offset markets. According to Jonathan Godwin, the added cost of incorporating Orbital’s carbon-removal material amounts to roughly 10 per cent of the hourly charge of renting a GPU chip for AI training, significantly less than the price of most carbon offsets. This cost-effectiveness could make the proposition commercially attractive, helping data centre operators improve their environmental performance without eroding their bottom line.

Efficiency and Water Usage

While reducing CO₂ emissions is a crucial goal, the AWS–Orbital partnership also aims to tackle other environmental challenges associated with large-scale computing infrastructure. For example, data centres are thirsty operations, requiring huge amounts of water to maintain their cooling systems. Therefore, the ability to integrate more efficient, high-performance materials into cooling processes could lead to reductions in both energy and water consumption.

Speaking about the partnership (on the Amazon website), Orbital’s CEO Jonathan Godwin said, “Our partnership with AWS will accelerate the deployment of our advanced technologies for data centre decarbonisation and efficiency. Working with the market-leading AWS team will accelerate our development of products in cooling, water utilisation, and carbon removal.” In a similar vein, Howard Gefen, General Manager of AWS Energy & Utilities, stated, “AWS looks forward to collaborating with Orbital and their mission to drive data centre decarbonisation and efficiency.”

By designing materials that can capture carbon, improve cooling efficiency, and potentially reduce water consumption, Orbital’s platform looks as though it could open new pathways for sustainable data centre operations. The success of these early trials could lead the way to more widespread adoption of such materials throughout the data centre industry.

Technical and Logistical Challenges

Of course, the introduction of any new technology brings its own challenges. For example, trying to integrate an advanced filtration material into a complex data centre cooling system will alter airflow characteristics. Although this change could increase the workload on existing fans and pumps, Orbital believes the net effect will be positive. Also, the slightly higher energy required for pumping air through the new filters should be more than compensated for by the benefits of lower emissions and improved resource efficiency.

Another pressing consideration is handling the captured CO₂. Once the gas is isolated from the airstream, what then? While specific details of exactly how the carbon will be stored or reused are currently not being made clear, the partners will, no doubt, need robust protocols for managing the extracted greenhouse gases sustainably. Ensuring safe, long-term storage or practical utilisation of this captured carbon is likely to be key to the project’s overall success.

Not The Only One Involved In Data Centre Carbon Capture

It should be noted here that Orbital is not alone in pursuing on-site carbon capture in data centres. For example, other tech giants such as Alphabet (Google) and Meta have filed patents related to similar concepts, and start-ups like 280 Earth are also working on solutions to tackle data centre emissions at source. However, what appears to distinguish Orbital’s approach is its ability to move fast and iterate quickly. By using generative AI to design and test materials virtually, Orbital can arrive at promising formulations far faster than traditional lab-based methods.

This accelerated materials discovery process looks like giving Orbital a potential edge in developing specialised compounds. For example, its carbon-removal material is tailored to work effectively with hot, CO₂-laden air exiting data centre servers. Rather than building a generic carbon filter, Orbital can produce optimised materials that function well under real-world operational conditions.

Wider Applications and Open Access to AI Models

Beyond this single pilot project, Orbital’s technology could also have a much broader impact. For example, the start-up plans to make its open-source AI model ‘Orb’ available to AWS customers via Amazon SageMaker JumpStart and AWS Marketplace. This means that other companies tackling their own materials and climate challenges, whether in semiconductors, batteries, or electronics, will soon have a powerful new tool at their disposal.

Such accessibility is critical. Orbital’s AI-driven approach, therefore, does not appear to just offer one clever solution to a pressing sustainability issue, but could represent a new methodology for discovering and optimising advanced materials. By making these capabilities available in the cloud, Orbital and AWS hope to democratise materials R&D, thereby, hopefully, empowering a wider range of enterprises to contribute to sustainability-driven innovation.

Keeping Pace with Sustainability Targets

The urgency driving projects also comes from the large technology companies having pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions within the coming decades. Yet, as AI models grow more complex, requiring ever more computational power, energy usage soars. Without new interventions, these data centres risk undermining carefully set climate targets.

AWS, as the world’s largest cloud-computing provider by revenue, is under particular scrutiny. Millions of customers rely on its infrastructure, and sustainability commitments have become a point of competitive differentiation. By embracing on-site carbon capture and making advanced materials more accessible, AWS is banking on not only working to meet its own targets but potentially setting a precedent that others in the industry may follow.

Potential Ripple Effects Across the Sector

If the AWS pilot proves successful, it could catalyse a wave of adoption in data centres across the globe. On-site carbon capture may offer a more transparent and reliable way of verifying emissions reductions than conventional offsets. It might even allow data centre operators to generate their own carbon credits by capturing more CO₂ than they produce, thereby transforming a cost centre into a revenue stream.

Such a shift would, however, require careful economic, regulatory, and environmental considerations. For now, the AWS–Orbital initiative is a test (albeit part of a “multi-year” commitment), but one that carries high stakes and considerable promise. This early pilot could be said to represent a proactive step towards embedding sustainability at the heart of AI-driven infrastructure and an opportunity to ensure that the digital revolution does not come at an unacceptable environmental cost.

What Does This Mean For Your Organisation?

In many ways, the AWS–Orbital pilot project encapsulates the evolving relationship between digital infrastructure and the urgent need to address our environmental responsibilities. By attempting to capture carbon on-site rather than relying solely on offsets, AWS is exploring a pathway that could be more transparent, cost-effective, and efficient. Orbital’s rapid, AI-driven approach to materials discovery highlights a significant shift in how quickly breakthroughs can be achieved, and the involvement of AWS, arguably one of the most influential players in the sector, puts added weight behind this experimentation.

However, the path forward is not going to be without its hurdles. For example, integrating new materials into data centres, ensuring that carbon can be meaningfully stored or reused, and consistently meeting demanding performance standards will all require careful planning and meticulous execution. Also, the costs, although promising at present, are likely to evolve alongside technological improvements and market conditions, meaning that careful economic analysis will remain crucial.

Beyond this specific partnership (due to last an unspecified, but probably a small number of years), it suggests that the integration of advanced materials and AI-driven R&D could help carve out a more sustainable future for data centres worldwide.