AI Boom Drives Up Emissions, Creating $20Bn Carbon Removal Opportunity

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing is inadvertently contributing to increased carbon emissions, presenting both a challenge and an opportunity for carbon removal technologies, according to an industry expert.

“Our increasing usage of computer technology, AI, etc, running all these data centres require a lot of energy and so that has a perspective of who is a large source of emissions from an industrial standpoint,” Ebb Carbon CFO Jeff Kennedy said at a Web Summit Qatar session on Wednesday.

The talk pointed to users’ energy consumption, driven by AI and supercomputers, which is becoming increasingly power-intensive. This, he said, is shifting the landscape of major polluters from traditional industries to the tech sector.

Kennedy said advancements in technology contribute to increased carbon emissions, potentially bringing humanity “back to square one” in the fight against climate change.

However, he said that he views this challenge as a huge opportunity for innovative carbon removal solutions like Ebb Carbon’s ocean alkalinity enhancement technology.

“Those of us that are in the sustainable industry look at that challenge as an opportunity,” Kennedy said. He cited UAE’s desalination industry as an example, estimating that translating it into carbon removal represents a $20bn opportunity.

Kennedy suggested that a sustainable future and reduced CO2 impact ca be achieved through partnerships with existing water processing companies.

He reiterated that the core of Ebb Carbon’s technology lies in its partnership with the ocean, the world’s largest carbon sink: “There are many different approaches out there. The ocean is the biggest kind of ally in mitigating climate change because today, it stores 60 times more carbon than what exists in the atmosphere”.

He highlighted that Ebb Carbon’s modular system, inspired by the scaling success of the solar industry, offers a cost-effective and replicable approach to large-scale carbon removal.

About the accessibility of carbon removal technologies, Kennedy drew a parallel between Ebb Carbon’s approach and the evolution of solar power. Just as the unit cost of solar panels has drastically decreased over the past few decades, his Ebb Carbon is focused on building modular units that can be replicated at scale to achieve low-cost carbon removal.