Amazon Web Services (AWS) has partnered with Orbital Materials, which develops climate technologies and advanced materials, to find new methods for decarbonising data centres using AI technology.

The multi-year partnership will see AWS working with Orbital to use an AI platform to synthesise and test new technologies and advance materials such as integrated carbon removal, chip cooling, and water management.

Orbital aims to launch its integrated data centre carbon removal technology by the end of 2025.

The development of new advanced materials can be a slow process of trial and error in the lab. Orbital plans to replace this with generative AI design, which it says will improve the speed and efficacy of materials discovery and new technology commercialisation.

The company claims that since using an AI platform, it has seen a tenfold improvement in its materials performance.

As part of the partnership, Orbital will pre-train its frontier foundation models on Amazon SageMaker HyperPod, a purpose-built infrastructure for distributed training at scale. It will also deploy AWS’s custom silicon, Trainium, to improve cost performance for its deep learning workloads.

Orbital’s open-source AI model for simulating advanced materials, Orb, will be made available for AWS customers via Amazon SageMaker JumpStart and AWS Marketplace. This marks the first time an AI-for-materials model has been launched on an AWS platform.

AWS said that Orb will enable its customers working on advanced materials and technologies, like semiconductors, batteries, and electronics, to access research through a secure and unified cloud environment.

"AWS looks forward to collaborating with Orbital and their mission to drive data centre decarbonisation,” said Howard Gefen, general manager of AWS energy & utilities. “Together, we have the opportunity to set new benchmarks for carbon removal and efficiency across the industry."

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