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AWS has teamed up with an AI materials company to discover new ways to decarbonise data centres.
The deal between AWS and Orbital Materials will see the pair using artificial intelligence to create new datacentre decarbonisation and energy efficiency technologies, as well as related materials. According to AWS, the initial focus of the partnership will be carbon removal and datacentre cooling technologies.
Orbital will use its proprietary AI to help with designing, building and testing the technologies, while AWS will help to “evaluate [their] scalability and performance”, the pair said.
Orbital’s AI model for creating new materials, named Orb, has been open sourced by the company, and is free for use by startups and non-commercial projects. Orb allows researchers to virtually build new materials at an atomic level, rather than having to develop them physically in the lab, making the process cheaper and faster.
Orb, based on Orbital’s own LINUS model, is available through AWS Marketplace and Amazon’s machine learning hub SageMaker JumpStart.
Orbital will also use AWS’ SageMaker HyperPod for training and finetuning its foundational models. In addition, it will “evaluate deploying AWS’s custom silicon, Trainium, to improve cost performance for its Deep Learning workloads”, AWS said.
Data centres are expected to consume 8% all power in the US by 2030; where that energy comes from fossil fuel sources, it can be a significant contributor to the carbon emissions that are driving global warming.
According to Morgan Stanley, ongoing demand for data centre resources will drive the industry’s carbon dioxide emissions to 2.5 billion metric tons over the remainder of the decade, accounting for around 40% of all carbon emissions in the US.
A recent study by decarbonisation company CFP Energy noted that the data centre industry is finding the lack of suitable technologies to be one of the biggest obstacles to its decarbonisation efforts. The research found that 69% of respondents said technology availability is a significant road bump on the journey to greater decarbonisation, while 63% cited regulatory complexity and 61% referenced high upfront costs as barriers.
The most popular decarbonisation strategies used with European data centres include green certificates (renewable energy credits offset against emissions), the use of biofuels, voluntary carbon credits and carbon capture, CFP Energy said.
