Parent company of Facebook announces at Climate Week an agreement to scale up production
Tech giant Meta has moved into investing in low carbon concrete production in an attempt to reduce the embodied carbon used to build its data centres.
Facebook’s parent company announced the agreement with CarbonBuilt, a company that has developed a concrete product replacing high-carbon Portland with a proprietary low-cost cement alternative.
Called Reversa®, the product is made from widely-available low carbon material that harden after chemically reacting with CO2. This process strengthens the concrete blocks and also permanently stores the CO2, diverting it from the atmosphere.
CarbonBuilt says its product enables customers to reduce their carbon footprint by up to 70% compared with industry baselines without affecting price, performance or plant operations.
Meta’s capital investment will be used by CarbonBuilt, set up four years’ ago, to upgrade two new concrete plants in the Arizona and Alabama in the US.
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Announcing the deal at Climate Week NYC yesterday, John DeAngelis, head of clean technology innovation at Meta, said: “Our global infrastructure is what enables us to deliver the products and services that billions of people use around the world, and data centres play a big role in that.
“But concrete as well as other key hard to abate industries represent a big chunk of the embodied missions associated with the data centre infrastructure.”
He said the Meta already looks at how to “densify” its data centres by delivering more megawatts of computing with smaller spaces and less concrete and specifying low carbon concrete.
He added that this deal is an attempt to target “emissions at the source” by helping concrete producers to scale up much faster than the current market conditions allow.
Rahul Shendure, chief executive at CarbonBuilt, said the capital funding was needed because the structure of the concrete market is delaying the uptake of low carbon solutions. He said: “It’s a hyper local business made up of small, medium sized companies, very low margin. […] We have to make this [low carbon solutions] profitable for a producer so that they want to make all their concrete this way.”
A new decarbonisation recoverable grant for low carbon technologies was also mentioned at the event by Sara Neff who recently left Lendlease for Microsoft and is now also co-director of The New Concrete.
She said: “We’re trying to solve this issue where there isn’t large scale project finance. Concrete is not a great fit for traditional project finance. The historic cash flows are difficult. Willingness to pay is tough. There’s just a lot of high capex. And so we decided to launch this fund focused on philanthropic and institutional capital to come in and be that catalytic capital through the recoverable grant.”
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