Microsoft has finalized a $1.7 billion agreement with the US startup Vaulted Deep to acquire 4.9 million metric tons of organic waste, which includes human waste, over a period of 12 years commencing in 2026. This initiative is part of the company’s strategy to mitigate the rising carbon emissions attributed to its AI systems, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. Currently, each ton of carbon is valued at around $350. The energy needed to operate the company’s AI systems has resulted in a significant increase in pollution levels. According to Microsoft’s annual Environmental Sustainability Report, the total carbon emissions have escalated by nearly 30 percent since 2020. Vaulted Deep is a startup focused on extracting carbon from the atmosphere by burying organic waste underground. The startup will gather organic waste, including human sewage, agricultural manure, paper mill sludge, and other byproducts, and transform it into a bioslurry. This bioslurry will then be injected deep underground, at depths exceeding 5,000 feet below the Earth’s surface. Once buried, the waste does not emit greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.
Julia Reichelstein, the CEO of Vaulted Deep, stated, “We are taking various types of organic waste that currently create issues above ground, and instead, we are placing it deep underground for permanent carbon removal.” The increase in their Scope 3 emissions is primarily due to the addition of new data centers and the carbon present in construction materials and hardware components like servers, racks, and semiconductors, as noted in the company’s blog post. The WSJ indicates that the company has thus far acquired over 83 million tons of carbon removal credits, including 59 million tons purchased this year. Microsoft aims to achieve carbon negativity by 2030 and aspires to generate 100 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources. By 2050, it intends to eliminate more greenhouse gases than the total emissions produced since its inception.
