AWS Partnership Leverages AI-Designed Materials to Decarbonize Data Centers

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has entered a multi-year partnership with Orbital Materials, a company that uses AI to develop advanced materials, to make data centers greener and more efficient.

Orbital Materials uses its AI platform to accelerate the development of advanced materials for carbon removal, chip cooling and water usage in data centers. This approach disrupts the traditionally slow and inefficient process of material development.

The company’s first product is a direct air capture (DAC) carbon removal technology that uses a proprietary active material. Orbital claims that it has achieved a 10x improvement in the material’s performance through the use of its AI platform since establishing its lab in the first quarter of 2024.

The partnership aims to significantly reduce Scope 3 emissions by integrating Orbital's DAC technology that uses waste heat into partners' data centers. Orbital is working on a full-scale pilot system for its partners, scheduled for the end of 2025. 

As part of the partnership, Orbital will pre-train and fine-tune its 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.

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“Our partnership with AWS will accelerate the deployment of our advanced technologies for data center decarbonization and efficiency,” said Jonathan Godwin, Orbital Materials’ CEO and co-founder. 

“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.”

Orbital plans to make its open-source AI model, “Orb,” accessible to AWS customers, enabling wider adoption of AI for developing sustainable technologies in various sectors, including semiconductors, batteries and electronics.

According to Orbital, the cost of making a renewable-powered data center carbon-negative using its material is $0.2 per GPU hour. This compares with the $2-10 per GPU hour that cloud providers currently charge, with AWS at the higher end of that spectrum.

“AWS looks forward to collaborating with Orbital and their mission to drive data center decarbonization,” said Howard Gefen, AWS Energy & Utilities general manager.

“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."

This article first appeared in IoT World Today's sister publication AI Business.