Srinagar, July 25: Microsoft is diving into one of the most unconventional areas of the carbon removal industry—human and industrial waste. The tech giant has signed a 12-year agreement with climate-tech startup Vaulted Deep, under which it will purchase 4.9 million metric tons of organic waste, including manure, sewage sludge, and paper mill residues, starting next year.
This deal, valued at approximately $1.7 billion based on an estimated price of $350 per ton of carbon, marks one of Microsoft’s most significant investments in carbon removal. Vaulted Deep found in 2023 specialises in collecting contaminated bioslurry waste that’s too messy to reuse and piping it 5000 feet below the Earth’s surface. Once buried, the decomposition process stops, locking in methane and CO₂ that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere.
Microsoft’s environmental idea comes at a time when its energy hungry AI operations are increasing its carbon emissions. Between 2020 and 2024, the company released 75.5 million tons of CO2. At the same time, its goal is to become carbon negative by 2030 and to remove more carbon than it can by 2050.
To hit that target, Microsoft is betting on a suite of experimental technologies. Vaulted Deep’s project joins a diverse carbon removal portfolio that includes reforesting Panama and capturing trash incineration emissions in Norway for storage beneath the North Sea. According to Inc., the current cost of CO2 removal with the company is $350 per ton. If you multiply that by Microsoft’s contract, that makes it worth more than $1.7 billion. However, neither entity has disclosed the actual terms of the deal, and CEO Julia Reichelstein says the company expects its costs to drop over time, and that the mentioned price isn’t the actual sum that the tech giant paid.
Projects such as these enable Microsoft and other tech giants to offset the massive amounts of carbon emissions produced by data centers, particularly as they consume a significant amount of electrical power, often generated from fossil fuels. For example, Musk is facing legal action in Memphis, Tennessee, after his company, xAI, is accused polluting the air by using under reported power generators at the Colossus Supercomputer. Aside from that, many companies, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle, and others, are investing in small modular reactor research to establish their clean energy sources for their expanding data center businesses.