This climate tech startup wants to capture carbon and help data centers cool

Data centers are a growing climate problem, especially as all the energy needed to train AI models increases tech companies’ carbon footprints. A startup that emerged from Google’s “moon factory” X says its technology could provide a potential solution. It can extract carbon dioxide from the air, partially run on waste heat from servers, and even generate water to help cool a data center more efficiently.

The company, 280 Earth, just signed a $40 million deal 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 the emerging carbon removal technology. Buyers include the founding members of Frontier, as well as Autodesk, H&M Group, JPMorgan Chase, Workday and other brands.

Filtering CO2 from the air is a trend among companies trying to meet sustainability goals but still struggling to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions using 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 lunar X launch, our vision was always to find a radically effective, affordable and scalable way to remove billions of tons of carbon from our atmosphere. We are excited to see this momentum with Frontier buyers,” said Astro Teller, captain of Alphabet’s X lunar flights, in an email statement.

280 Earth builds modules containing absorbent materials – called sorbents – to filter CO2 from the air. It’s similar to large industrial facilities called direct air capture (DAC) plants that other companies have begun building in recent years. But the 280 Earth says it can work more efficiently, allowing it to work in conjunction with data centers and extract some energy from waste heat.

Other DAC technologies work in large batches, waiting until the sorbent is fully saturated before heating the filter to high temperatures (above 100 degrees Celsius or 212 degrees Fahrenheit) to release and collect the CO2 it has trapped. 280 Earth says it saves energy by no working in batches. Instead, it continually moves the sorbent between two chambers to avoid the energy loss that occurs with reheating, cooling, and changing pressure in a single chamber.

It’s like the difference between a home oven and a professional pizza oven, says 280 Earth CEO John Pimentel. You lose heat and energy every time you turn a home oven on and off and open the door. The pizza oven retains heat better and remains at the same temperature.

280 Earth’s technology not only captures CO2, but also extracts water vapor that it can extract to provide water to a customer. It can collect two to four tons of water for every ton of CO2 captured, according to Pimentel.

All of this is supposed to create a win-win situation on Earth and a data center, or any other industrial facility that needs water and generates waste heat. One criticism of DAC technology is the amount of energy required to heat its filters. 280 Earth’s sorbents can do their work at temperatures low enough to utilize industrial waste heat. Meanwhile, data centers can consume a lot of electricity and water to run servers and prevent overheating. 280 The Earth can potentially help in this regard, absorbing waste heat and producing water for refrigeration systems in return.

The biggest impact, however, would be to eliminate the carbon emissions that cause climate change. Google’s carbon emissions have increased by nearly 50% since 2019, for example, thanks in large part to new and expanded data centers used to train AI. To that end, some environmental groups are concerned about the risk of relying on new strategies to capture CO2 pollution after it has already been released. After all, these are new technologies that have not yet been proven at scale. They are also prohibitively expensive at the moment.

280 Earth just built its pilot facility in Oregon in May, which will be used to capture 61,600 tons of CO2 by 2030 as part of the $40 million deal. The cost amounts to more than US$600 per ton of CO2 captured. The company is still finalizing plans for where to sequester the CO2 once it’s captured, likely sending most of it by truck and rail to underground storage wells somewhere in the US.

For context, Google was responsible for 14.3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution in 2023 alone. This shows how small an impact this initial carbon removal agreement would have on your global carbon footprint and how expensive it would be to pay to capture a larger share of your climate pollution.

Increasing carbon removal would reduce costs, says Pimentel. And he believes this buys companies time to transition to cleaner energy. “As much as we all want to believe that the transition away from fossil fuels will happen quickly… It will take decades,” says Pimentel. “However, we continue to pump more CO2 into the atmosphere, worsening the problems we already have. Therefore, I believe in all of the above solutions.”