UK cloud firm Civo is partnering with a carbon removal company.

Orbital Materials, which develops carbon removal products for the data center market, has partnered with UK-based web hosting firm Civo to deploy its technology at one of Civo’s UK data centers.

The pilot project will see Orbital deploy its novel carbon removal technology at a Civo data center and see Civo support Orbital in developing new materials and technology that could markedly improve the sustainability and efficiency of data centers. As part of the agreement, Orbital will also have access to Civo’s data center portfolio to pilot and test the new solutions.

“We are excited to partner with Civo to deploy our carbon removal technology for data centers which will help the data center industry transition to a more sustainable future. Our partnership with Civo will accelerate the development of our data center decarbonization and efficiency technologies,” said Jonathan Godwin, CEO and co-founder of Orbital.

The initial deployment is expected to be deployed at an undisclosed UK data center by the end of 2025. In addition, Civo will provide Orbital access to a high performance compute cluster with H200 Nvidia GPUs to support its AI model training, which is integral in the development of its carbon removal technology.

“With the growing investment in UK data centers and the UK government’s AI action plan, we must implement solutions now to reduce the environmental impact of the UK’s expanding data center capacity,” said Mark Boost, CEO of Civo.

Civo currently has two operational data centers in the UK in London and Swindon. In addition, last December, it launched its second UK cloud region in collaboration with Deep Green.

Orbital has already developed a number of proprietary technologies for the data center market out of their research facility in Princeton, New Jersey, US. This includes dual-use chillers, that provide data center level heat ejection then use the waste heat to capture CO2, and extreme liquid cooling.

In order to develop its products, Orbital uses AI to support the testing and development of advanced materials and climate technologies. As part of this, it has developed a carbon-filtering substance for use in data centers, that acts like a sponge at the atomic level and is able to interact with CO2 and sequester it from the atmosphere.

According to the company, it has already achieved a 10x improvement in the performance of the material through the use of its AI platform.

The pilot project with Civo follows a similar agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) signed in December. As part of that agreement, Orbital will pilot the use of its carbon-filtering material at one of AWS’ partner data centers in 2025. In addition, the deal permitted Orbital to use AWS technology to test more AI-generated materials to address water use and chip cooling in the data center sector.

Microsoft backs SAF

In other news, Microsoft announced it had signed a sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) purchase agreement with International Airlines Group (IAG) to reduce its Scope 3 lifecycle emissions from business travel and air freight.

The agreement is a five-year extension on a previous deal and will see Microsoft co-fund an additional 39,000 tons of SAF. In addition to offsetting CO2 related to its corporate travel, the purchase intends to cover SAF used by IAG airlines to ship data center components.

“We are taking our collaboration with IAG further, extending our SAF purchase agreement to bring Microsoft closer to our goal of being carbon negative by 2030, while ensuring a multi-year commitment to help drive greater SAF production,” said Julia Fidler, environmental sustainability fuel and materials decarbonization lead at Microsoft.

The SAF used will be produced from used cooking oil and food waste at Phillips 66’s UK-based Humberside refinery, and from sustainably sourced bioethanol at Georgia-based LanzaJet’s Freedom Pines Fuels.

IAG is the parent company of airlines including Aer Lingus, British Airways, Iberia, Vueling, and LEVEL.