AWS & Orbital To Use AI To Hit Carbon Goals, Only 16% Companies On Track: Accenture

As the interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has shot up phenomenally, so has the energy bill involved in powering these magical technologies, and experts and governments are sounding alarms about its insatiable surge in power consumption.

In this regard, one of the biggest issues being raised is that of an impending growth in carbon emissions, especially at a time when big tech is pushing forward with net zero carbon emission goals and plans of becoming carbon negative.

As a result, Microsoft recently announced that it was bringing back a nuclear power plant to power its AI data centers. This consisted of a partnership with Constellation Energy Corporation that would include restarting Constellation's Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear plant’s Unit 1.

Following this, Google revealed that it was signing the world’s first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors (SMR), developed by Kairos Power.

Next, Amazon came out with three deals of similar natures, which included partnering with Energy Northwest for four advanced SMRs, an investment in X-energy to enhance its Energy Northwest project, and an agreement with Dominion Energy to explore new development structures for SMRs.

SMRs are advanced nuclear reactors with smaller physical footprints that can be built faster than traditional ones, which allows them to be built closer to the grid and can help businesses reduce their carbon footprint by generating clean energy.

Now, Amazon is making a move to enhance its data center decarbonization and efficiency efforts, which comes in the form of a new strategic partnership with Orbital Materials (Orbital), through its Amazon Web Services (AWS) arm.

Orbital comes in with a proprietary AI platform that helps it incubate new advanced materials and climate technologies.

This multi-year partnership will aim to use AI to design, synthesize, and test new data center decarbonization and efficiency technologies, including advanced materials, and will be used for data center-integrated carbon removal, chip cooling, and water utilization. This is expected to be piloted in late 2025.

While the traditional trial-and-error process of developing new advanced materials usually is slow, Orbital’s GenAI design improves the speed and efficacy of materials discovery. As such, its AI platform has enabled a 10x improvement in its material’s performance.


Additionally, Orbital’s market-leading open-source AI model for simulating advanced materials, ‘Orb’, will be generally available for AWS customers on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart and AWS Marketplace. This will allow AWS customers to access advanced R&D to enhance technologies such as semiconductors, batteries, electronics, and more.

Orbital will also pre-train and fine-tune its frontier Foundation Models on Amazon SageMaker HyperPod, and could deploy AWS’s custom silicon, Trainium.

However, that’s not how everyone sees it.

“AI can help but can only go so far when only 22% of AI-employing companies are currently using it for decarbonization, the most realistic scenario is probably one in which AI initially emits more than it abates, until a critical crossover point,” says Stephanie Jamison, Global Resources Industry Practice Lead and Global Sustainability Services Lead at Accenture.

“Responsible and sustainable scaling of AI means ensuring that crossover point is reached as early as possible.”

Her comments come through a news release announcing Accenture’s fourth Destination Net Zero report, which consists of an analysis of 2,000 of the biggest companies worldwide.

The report found that only one in six (16%) of the world’s largest companies are currently on track to reach net zero emissions in their operations by 2050. Instead, 45% of them continue to increase their carbon emissions, while just 14% are using AI to reduce emissions.

However, while full net zero target-setting has stalled at 37%, 52% of companies have cut both carbon emissions and emissions intensity since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2016.

“A majority of the world's largest companies are now cutting their emissions even as the size of their operations and revenues grow,” added Stephanie Jamison. “While this is a significant milestone, to get to net zero by 2050 all of us need to move faster, together, to reinvent sustainable value chains using deep collaboration and transformative technologies.”

Do you think the increased adoption of AI to help reduce carbon emissions will be adopted by more companies?

Let us know in the comments below!