Amazon Web Services (AWS) has signed a multi-year partnership to draw on the artificial intelligence (AI) expertise of US-based Orbital Materials to create technologies that will accelerate the decarbonisation of the public cloud giant’s datacentres.
Founded in 2022, Orbital Materials has a proprietary AI platform – dubbed Orb – to design, create and test advanced materials and nascent technologies to help tackle climate change.
The first technology the company has created using its platform is one focused on direct air capture, which enables carbon dioxide to be removed from the air, and is made of a proprietary active material.
AWS is working with Orbital to launch a full-scale pilot deployment of Orbital’s direct air-capture technology in its datacentres as part of a push to reduce its Scope 3 emissions. “AWS will work with Orbital to utilise its proprietary AI platform to design, synthesise and test new technologies and advanced materials for datacentre-integrated carbon removal, chip cooling and water utilisation,” said Orbital, in a statement.
According to Orbital, traditionally, the creation of advanced materials has been a slow process, because it involves so much trial and error, but its platform’s use of generative AI has accelerated the pace of new materials being discovered and commercialised.
As well as allowing Amazon to benefit from the fruit of its labours, Orbital is also making its platform available to AWS customers by selling it through the company’s marketplace and via its Amazon SageMaker JumpStart hub.
The latter is a resource that AWS customers can use to access foundation models and pre-built machine learning and AI offerings. “Orb will enable AWS customers working on advanced materials and technologies, like semiconductors, batteries and electronics, to access accelerated research and development [processes] within a secure and unified cloud environment,” the company added.
Decarbonisation and efficiency
Jonathan Godwin, CEO and co-founder of Orbital Materials, said the company’s technology could help AWS make its datacentres more environmentally friendly in various ways. “Our partnership with AWS will accelerate the deployment of our advanced technologies for datacentre decarbonisation and efficiency,” said Godwin.
“Working with the market-leading AWS team will ensure that our suite of products in cooling, water utilisation and carbon removal enables the next generation of datacentres powering the AI revolution.”
The collaboration between the two firms will also see Orbital pre-train and tweak its frontier foundation models on the Amazon SageMaker HyperPod, which is a purpose-built infrastructure designed to accelerate the time it takes to train foundation models.
Furthermore, Orbital will evaluate deploying AWS’s custom silicon, Trainium, to improve the cost performance of its deep learning workloads.
“Through Amazon SageMaker HyperPod and AWS Trainium, we can accelerate the development of breakthrough sustainability technologies,” said Howard Gefen, general manager of AWS energy and utilities.
“By integrating Orb with Amazon SageMaker JumpStart and AWS Marketplace, we will enable sustainable innovation more widely,” he added. “Together, we have the opportunity to set new benchmarks for carbon removal and efficiency across the industry.”