Climate tech company wants to help data centers cool down

280 Earth and Data Centers: Working Together to Reduce Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the Atmosphere for Silicon Valley Companies and Industrial Facilities

That’s all supposed to create a win-win situation for 280 Earth and a data center, or any other industrial facility that needs water and creates waste heat. One critique of DAC technology is how much energy it might need to heat up its filters. At low temperatures, Earth’s sorbents are able to use that industrial waste heat. Data centers can burn a lot of electricity and water to run their server equipment, and keep it from overheating. Drawing in waste heat and producing water for cooling systems can be a way to help on that end.

Google has the goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2030. The company’s carbon neutral operations are due to the offsets it buys to match its emissions.

Not only does 280 Earth’s technology capture CO2, but it also happens to pull in water vapor that it can extract to provide water for a customer. It can gather two to four tons of water for every ton of CO2 captured, according to Pimentel.

Costs would come down if carbon removal was scaled up. And he believes it buys time for companies as they transition to cleaner energy. We all want to believe that the transition off of fossil fuels is going to be quick. It will take decades, says Pimentel. The problem we already have is worsened because we are pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere. So I’m a believer in the all of the above solution.”

Tech companies have a growing climate problem as the energy used to train artificial intelligence models inflates their carbon footprints. A startup that was spun out of the “moonshot factory” X believes it can provide a solution. It can pull carbon dioxide out of the air and even run some heat from the server to cool a data center.

Filtering CO2 out of the air is trending among companies trying to hit sustainability targets but still struggling to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by turning to clean energy. Frontier has also brokered deals between big tech companies and other startups working to capture carbon using rocks, liquid smoke, and even sewage.

“When we started 280 Earth as a moonshot at X, our vision was always to find a radically effective, affordable and scalable way to remove billions of tons of carbon from our atmosphere. We’re excited to see this momentum with Frontier buyers,” Astro Teller, captain of moonshots at Alphabet’s X, said in an emailed statement.

AI Brings Soaring Emissions for Google and Microsoft, a Major Contributor to Climate Change (Pimentel’s Theorem)

John Pimentel says that it’s like the difference between a home oven and a professional pizza oven. You lose heat and energy when you turn the home oven on and off. The pizza oven stays at the same temperature and retains heat, whereas the other way around is not true.

As it gets more sophisticated, it needs more energy. In the U.S., a majority of that energy comes from burning fossil fuels like coal and gas which are primary drivers of climate change.

In its most recent quarterly report, the company said it spent $12 billion on capital expenditures, which was driven by investments in data centers. The company said it will maintain that level of spending throughout the year.

Major tech companies are increasing their spending on artificial intelligence. Pichai thinks that the company is an ‘ai-first’ one. Over the last few months, the company released its Gemini chatbot to the world and added its A.I. Overview tool to Google Search. Facebook parent Meta has added chatbots to several of its products. An announcement was made by Apple last month about a partnership with OpenAI.

Source: AI brings soaring emissions for Google and Microsoft, a major contributor to climate change

How does AI consume electricity? A report by Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, with an accompanying analysis of the Washington Post, in 2023

Currently, there are more than 7,000 data centers worldwide, according to Bloomberg. That’s up from 3,600 in 2015. When combined, Bloomberg estimates these data centers consume the equivalent amount of electricity per year as the entire country of Italy.

The Washington Post reported that plans to decommission several coal plants have been delayed because of the high demand for electricity.

He is an analyst at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and he has been researching how AI consumes energy. Artificial intelligence uses more power than the internet does to generate its answers. According to a report by Goldman Sachs, a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity as a Google search query.

“The infrastructure and electricity needed for these technologies create new challenges for meeting sustainability commitments across the tech sector,” the report reads.

He says that a query to thechatgpt uses approximately as much electricity as it would take to light a single light bulb. It adds up to a lot of electricity with millions of people using it every day.

According to the report, in the year 2023, the company wrote that it was no longer maintaining carbon neutrality. The company says it’s still pushing for its net-zero goal in 2030.