The AI Boom Rests on Billions of Tonnes of Concrete

Along the country road that leads to ATL4, a giant data center going up east of Atlanta, dozens of parked cars and pickups lean tenuously on the narrow dirt shoulders. The many out-of-state plates are typical of the phalanx of tradespeople who muster for these massive construction jobs. With tech giants, utilities, and governments budgeting upwards of US $1 trillion for capital expansion to join the global battle for AI dominance, data centers are the bunkers, factories, and skunkworks-and concrete and electricity are the fuel and ammunition.

To the casual observer, the data industry can seem incorporeal, its products conjured out of weightless bits. But as I stand beside the busy construction site for DataBank's ATL4, what impresses me most is the gargantuan amount of material-mostly concrete-that gives shape to the goliath that will house, secure, power, and cool the hardware of AI. Big data is big concrete. And that poses a big problem.

This article is part of our special report, Reinventing Invention: Stories from Innovation's Edge."

Concrete is not just a major ingredient in data centers and the power plants being built to energize them. As the world's most widely manufactured material, concrete-and especially the cement within it-is also a major contributor to climate change, accounting for around 6 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Data centers use so much concrete that the construction boom is wrecking tech giants' commitments to eliminate their carbon emissions. Even though Google, Meta, and Microsoft have touted goals to be carbon neutral or negative by 2030, and Amazon by 2040, the industry is now moving in the wrong direction.

Last year, Microsoft's carbon emissions jumped by over 30 percent, primarily due to the materials in its new data centers. Google's greenhouse emissions are up by nearly 50 percent over the past five years. As data centers proliferate worldwide, Morgan Stanley projects that data centers will release about 2.5 billion tonnes of CO₂each year by 2030-or about 40 percent of what the United States currently emits from all sources.

But even as innovations in AI and the big-data construction boom are boosting emissions for the tech industry's hyperscalers, the reinvention of concrete could also play a big part in solving the problem. Over the last decade, there's been a wave of innovation, some of it profit-driven, some of it from academic labs, aimed at fixing concrete's carbon problem. Pilot plants are being fielded to capture CO₂ from cement plants and sock it safely away. Other projects are cooking up climate-friendlier recipes for cements. And AI and other computational tools are illuminating ways to drastically cut carbon by using less cement in concrete and less concrete in data centers, power plants, and other structures.

Demand for green concrete is clearly growing. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft recently joined an initiative led by the Open Compute Project Foundation to accelerate testing and deployment of low-carbon concrete in data centers, for example. Supply is increasing, too-though it's still minuscule compared to humanity's enormous appetite for moldable rock. But if the green goals of big tech can jump-start innovation in low-carbon concrete and create a robust market for it as well, the boom in big data could eventually become a boon for the planet.

Hyperscaler Data Centers: So Much Concrete

At the construction site for ATL4, I'm met by Tony Qorri, the company's big, friendly, straight-talking head of construction. He says that this giant building and four others DataBank has recently built or is planning in the Atlanta area will together add 133,000 square meters (1.44 million square feet) of floor space.

They all follow a universal template that Qorri developed to optimize the construction of the company's ever-larger centers. At each site, trucks haul in more than a thousand prefabricated concrete pieces: wall panels, columns, and other structural elements. Workers quickly assemble the precision-measured parts. Hundreds of electricians swarm the building to wire it up in just a few days. Speed is crucial when construction delays can mean losing ground in the AI battle.

The ATL4 data center outside Atlanta is one of five being built by DataBank. Together they will add over 130,000 square meters of floor space.DataBank

That battle can be measured in new data centers and floor space. The United States is home to more than 5,000 data centers today, and the Department of Commerce forecasts that number to grow by around 450 a year through 2030. Worldwide, the number of data centers now exceeds 10,000, and analysts project another 26.5 million m² of floor space over the next five years. Here in metro Atlanta, developers broke ground last year on projects that will triple the region's data-center capacity. Microsoft, for instance, is planning a 186,000-m²complex; big enough to house around 100,000 rack-mounted servers, it will consume 324 megawatts of electricity.

The velocity of the data-center boom means that no one is pausing to await greener cement. For now, the industry's mantra is Build, baby, build."

There's no good substitute for concrete in these projects," says Aaron Grubbs, a structural engineer at ATL4. The latest processors going on the racks are bigger, heavier, hotter, and far more power hungry than previous generations. As a result, you add a lot of columns," Grubbs says.

1,000 Companies Working on Green Concrete

Concrete may not seem an obvious star in the story of how electricity and electronics have permeated modern life. Other materials-copper and silicon, aluminum and lithium-get higher billing. But concrete provides the literal, indispensable foundation for the world's electrical workings. It is the solid, stable, durable, fire-resistant stuff that makes power generation and distribution possible. It undergirds nearly all advanced manufacturing and telecommunications. What was true in the rapid build-out of the power industry a century ago remains true today for the data industry: Technological progress begets more growth-and more concrete. Although each generation of processor and memory squeezes more computing onto each chip, and advances in superconducting microcircuitry raise the tantalizing prospect of slashing the data center's footprint, Qorri doesn't think his buildings will shrink to the size of a shoebox anytime soon. I've been through that kind of change before, and it seems the need for space just grows with it," he says.

By weight, concrete is not a particularly carbon-intensive material. Creating a kilogram of steel, for instance, releases about 2.4 times as much CO₂ as a kilogram of cement does. But the global construction industry consumes about 35 billion tonnes of concrete a year. That's about 4 tonnes for every person on the planet and twice as much as all other building materials combined. It's that massive scale-and the associated cost and sheer number of producers-that creates both a threat to the climate and inertia that resists change.

At its Edmonton, Alberta, plant [above], Heidelberg Materials is adding systems to capture carbon dioxide produced by the manufacture of Portland cement.Heidelberg Materials North America

Yet change is afoot. When I visited the innovation center operated by the Swiss materials giant Holcim, in Lyon, France, research executives told me about the database they've assembled of nearly 1,000 companies working to decarbonize cement and concrete. None yet has enough traction to measurably reduce global concrete emissions. But the innovators hope that the boom in data centers-and in associated infrastructure such as new nuclear reactors and offshore wind farms, where each turbine foundation can use up to 7,500 cubic meters of concrete-may finally push green cement and concrete beyond labs, startups, and pilot plants.

Why cement production emits so much carbon

Though the terms cement" and concrete" are often conflated, they are not the same thing. A popular analogy in the industry is that cement is the egg in the concrete cake. Here's the basic recipe: Blend cement with larger amounts of sand and other aggregates. Then add water, to trigger a chemical reaction with the cement. Wait a while for the cement to form a matrix that pulls all the components together. Let sit as it cures into a rock-solid mass.

Portland cement, the key binder in most of the world's concrete, was serendipitously invented in England by William Aspdin, while he was tinkering with earlier mortars that his father, Joseph, had patented in 1824. More than a century of science has revealed the essential chemistry of how cement works in concrete, but new findings are still leading to important innovations, as well as insights into how concrete absorbs atmospheric carbon as it ages.

As in the Aspdins' day, the process to make Portland cement still begins with limestone, a sedimentary mineral made from crystalline forms of calcium carbonate. Most of the limestone quarried for cement originated hundreds of millions of years ago, when ocean creatures mineralized calcium and carbonate in seawater to make shells, bones, corals, and other hard bits.

Cement producers often build their large plants next to limestone quarries that can supply decades' worth of stone. The stone is crushed and then heated in stages as it is combined with lesser amounts of other minerals that typically include calcium, silicon, aluminum, and iron. What emerges from the mixing and cooking are small, hard nodules called clinker. A bit more processing, grinding, and mixing turns those pellets into powdered Portland cement, which accounts for about 90 percent of the CO₂ emitted by the production of conventional concrete [see infographic, Roads to Cleaner Concrete"].

Karen Scrivener, shown in her lab at EPFL, has developed concrete recipes that reduce emissions by 30 to 40 percent.Stefan Wermuth/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Decarbonizing Portland cement is often called heavy industry's hard problem" because of two processes fundamental to its manufacture. The first process is combustion: To coax limestone's chemical transformation into clinker, large heaters and kilns must sustain temperatures around 1,500 C. Currently that means burning coal, coke, fuel oil, or natural gas, often along with waste plastics and tires. The exhaust from those fires generates 35 to 50 percent of the cement industry's emissions. Most of the remaining emissions result from gaseous CO₂ liberated by the chemical transformation of the calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) into calcium oxide (CaO), a process called calcination. That gas also usually heads straight into the atmosphere.

Concrete production, in contrast, is mainly a business of mixing cement powder with other ingredients and then delivering the slurry speedily to its destination before it sets. Most concrete in the United States is prepared to order at batch plants-souped-up materials depots where the ingredients are combined, dosed out from hoppers into special mixer trucks, and then driven to job sites. Because concrete grows too stiff to work after about 90 minutes, concrete production is highly local. There are more ready-mix batch plants in the United States than there are Burger King restaurants.

Batch plants can offer thousands of potential mixes, customized to fit the demands of different jobs. Concrete in a hundred-story building differs from that in a swimming pool. With flexibility to vary the quality of sand and the size of the stone-and to add a wide variety of chemicals-batch plants have more tricks for lowering carbon emissions than any cement plant does.

Cement plants that capture carbon

China accounts for more than half of the concrete produced and used in the world, but companies there are hard to track. Outside of China, the top three multinational cement producers-Holcim, Heidelberg Materials in Germany, and Cemex in Mexico-have launched pilot programs to snare CO₂ emissions before they escape and then bury the waste deep underground. To do that, they're taking carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology already used in the oil and gas industry and bolting it onto their cement plants.

These pilot programs will need to scale up without eating profits-something that eluded the coal industry when it tried CCS decades ago. Tough questions also remain about where exactly to store billions of tonnes of CO₂ safely, year after year.

The appeal of CCS for cement producers is that they can continue using existing plants while still making progress toward carbon neutrality, which trade associations have committed to reach by 2050. But with well over 3,000 plants around the world, adding CCS to all of them would take enormous investment. Currently less than 1 percent of the global supply is low-emission cement. Accenture, a consultancy, estimates that outfitting the whole industry for carbon capture could cost up to $900 billion.

The economics of carbon capture is a monster," says Rick Chalaturnyk, a professor of geotechnical engineering at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada, who studies carbon capture in the petroleum and power industries. He sees incentives for the early movers on CCS, however. If Heidelberg, for example, wins the race to the lowest carbon, it will be the first [cement] company able to supply those customers that demand low-carbon products"-customers such as hyperscalers.

Though cement companies seem unlikely to invest their own billions in CCS, generous government subsidies have enticed several to begin pilot projects. Heidelberg has announced plans to start capturing CO₂ from its Edmonton operations in late 2026, transforming it into what the company claims would be the world's first full-scale net-zero cement plant." Exhaust gas will run through stations that purify the CO₂ and compress it into a liquid, which will then be transported to chemical plants to turn it into products or to depleted oil and gas reservoirs for injection underground, where hopefully it will stay put for an epoch or two.

Chalaturnyk says that the scale of the Edmonton plant, which aims to capture a million tonnes of CO₂ a year, is big enough to give CCS technology a reasonable test. Proving the economics is another matter. Half the $1 billion cost for the Edmonton project is being paid by the governments of Canada and Alberta.

ROADS TO CLEANERCONCRETE

As the big-data construction boom boosts the tech industry's emissions, the reinvention of concrete could play a major role in solving the problem.

CONCRETE TODAY Most of the greenhouse emissions from concrete come from the production of Portland cement, which requires high heat and releases carbon dioxide (CO₂) directly into the air.

CONCRETE TOMORROW At each stage of cement and concrete production, advances in ingredients, energy supplies, and uses of concrete promise to reduce waste and pollution.

The U.S. Department of Energy has similarly offered Heidelberg up to $500 million to help cover the cost of attaching CCS to its Mitchell, Ind., plant and burying up to 2 million tonnes of CO₂ per year below the plant. And the European Union has gone even bigger, allocating nearly 1.5 billion ($1.6 billion) from its Innovation Fund to support carbon capture at cement plants in seven of its member nations.

These tests are encouraging, but they are all happening in rich countries, where demand for concrete peaked decades ago. Even in China, concrete production has started to flatten. All the growth in global demand through 2040 is expected to come from less-affluent countries, where populations are still growing and quickly urbanizing. According to projections by the Rhodium Group, cement production in those regions is likely to rise from around 30 percent of the world's supply today to 50 percent by 2050 and 80 percent before the end of the century.

So will rich-world CCS technology translate to the rest of the world? I asked Juan Esteban Calle Restrepo, the CEO of Cementos Argos, the leading cement producer in Colombia, about that when I sat down with him recently at his office in Medellin. He was frank. Carbon capture may work for the U.S. or Europe, but countries like ours cannot afford that," he said.

Better cement through chemistry

As long as cement plants run limestone through fossil-fueled kilns, they will generate excessive amounts of carbon dioxide. But there may be ways to ditch the limestone-and the kilns. Labs and startups have been finding replacements for limestone, such as calcined kaolin clay and fly ash, that don't release CO₂ when heated. Kaolin clays are abundant around the world and have been used for centuries in Chinese porcelain and more recently in cosmetics and paper. Fly ash-a messy, toxic by-product of coal-fired power plants-is cheap and still widely available, even as coal power dwindles in many regions.

At the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Karen Scrivener and colleagues developed cements that blend calcined kaolin clay and ground limestone with a small portion of clinker. Calcining clay can be done at temperatures low enough that electricity from renewable sources can do the job. Various studies have found that the blend, known as LC3, can reduce overall emissions by 30 to 40 percent compared to those of Portland cement.

LC3 is also cheaper to make than Portland cement and performs as well for nearly all common uses. As a result, calcined clay plants have popped up across Africa, Europe, and Latin America. In Colombia, Cementos Argos is already producing more than 2 million tonnes of the stuff annually. The World Economic Forum's Centre for Energy and Materials counts LC3 among the best hopes for the decarbonization of concrete. Wide adoption by the cement industry, the centre reckons, can help prevent up to 500 million tonnes of CO₂ emissions by 2030."

In a win-win for the environment, fly ash can also be used as a building block for low- and even zero-emission concrete, and the high heat of processing neutralizes many of the toxins it contains. Ancient Romans used volcanic ash to make slow-setting but durable concrete: The Pantheon, built nearly two millennia ago with ash-based cement, is still in great shape.

Coal fly ash is a cost-effective ingredient that has reactive properties similar to those of Roman cement and Portland cement. Many concrete plants already add fresh fly ash to their concrete mixes, replacing 15 to35 percent of the cement. The ash improves the workability of the concrete, and though the resulting concrete is not as strong for the first few months, it grows stronger than regular concrete as it ages, like the Pantheon.

University labs have tested concretes made entirely with fly ash and found that some actually outperform the standard variety. More than 15 years ago, researchers at Montana State University used concrete made with 100 percent fly ash in the floors and walls of a credit union and a transportation research center. But performance depends greatly on the chemical makeup of the ash, which varies from one coal plant to the next, and on following a tricky recipe. The decommissioning of coal-fired plants has also been making fresh fly ash scarcer and more expensive.

At Sublime Systems' pilot plant in Massachusetts, the company is using electrochemistry instead of heat to produce lime silicate cements that can replace Portland cement.Tony Luong

That has spurred new methods to treat and use fly ash that's been buried in landfills or dumped into ponds. Such industrial burial grounds hold enough fly ash to make concrete for decades, even after every coal plant shuts down. Utah-based Eco Material Technologies is now producing cements that include both fresh and recovered fly ash as ingredients. The company claims it can replace up to 60 percent of the Portland cement in concrete-and that a new variety, suitable for 3D printing, can substitute entirely for Portland cement.

Hive 3D Builders, a Houston-based startup, has been feeding that low-emissions concrete into robots that are printinghouses in several Texas developments. We are 100 percent Portland cement-free," says Timothy Lankau, Hive 3D's CEO. We want our homes to last 1,000 years."

Sublime Systems, a startup spun out of MIT by battery scientists, uses electrochemistry rather than heat to make low-carbon cement from rocks that don't contain carbon. Similar to a battery, Sublime's process uses a voltage between an electrode and a cathode to create a pH gradient that isolates silicates and reactive calcium, in the form of lime (CaO). The company mixes those ingredients together to make a cement with no fugitive carbon, no kilns or furnaces, and binding power comparable to that of Portland cement. With the help of $87 million from the U.S. Department of Energy, Sublime is building a plant in Holyoke, Mass., that will be powered almost entirely by hydroelectricity. Recently the company was tapped to provide concrete for a major offshore wind farm planned off the coast of Martha's Vineyard.

Software takes on the hard problem of concrete

It is unlikely that any one innovation will allow the cement industry to hit its target of carbon neutrality before 2050. New technologies take time to mature, scale up, and become cost-competitive. In the meantime, says Philippe Block, a structural engineer at ETH Zurich, smart engineering can reduce carbon emissions through the leaner use of materials.

His research group has developed digital design tools that make clever use of geometry to maximize the strength of concrete structures while minimizing their mass. The team's designs start with the soaring architectural elements of ancient temples, cathedrals, and mosques-in particular, vaults and arches-which they miniaturize and flatten and then 3D print or mold inside concrete floors and ceilings. The lightweight slabs, suitable for the upper stories of apartment and office buildings, use much less concrete and steel reinforcement and have a CO₂ footprint that's reduced by 80 percent.

There's hidden magic in such lean design. In multistory buildings, much of the mass of concrete is needed just to hold the weight of the material above it. The carbon savings of Block's lighter slabs thus compound, because the size, cost, and emissions of a building's conventional-concrete elements are slashed.

Vaulted, a Swiss startup, uses digital design tools to minimize the concrete in floors and ceilings, cutting their CO₂ footprint by 80 percent.Vaulted

In Dubendorf, Switzerland, a wildly shaped experimental building has floors, roofs, and ceilings created by Block's structural system. Vaulted, a startup spun out of ETH, is engineering and fabricating the lighter floors of a 10-story office building under construction in Zug, Switzerland.

That country has also been a leader in smart ways to recycle and reuse concrete, rather than simply landfilling demolition rubble. This is easier said than done-concrete is tough stuff, riddled with rebar. But there's an economic incentive: Raw materials such as sand and limestone are becoming scarcer and more costly. Some jurisdictions in Europe now require that new buildings be made from recycled and reused materials. The new addition of the Kunsthaus Zurich museum, a showcase of exquisite Modernist architecture, uses recycled material for all but 2 percent of its concrete.

As new policies goose demand for recycled materials and threaten to restrict future use of Portland cement across Europe, Holcim has begun building recycling plants that can reclaim cement clinker from old concrete. It recently turned the demolition rubble from some 1960s apartment buildings outside Paris into part of a 220-unit housing complex-touted as the first building made from 100 percent recycled concrete. The company says it plans to build concrete recycling centers in every major metro area in Europe and, by 2030, to include 30 percent recycled material in all of its cement.

Further innovations in low-carbon concrete are certain to come, particularly as the powers of machine learning are applied to the problem. Over the past decade, the number of research papers reporting on computational tools to explore the vast space of possible concrete mixes has grown exponentially. Much as AI is being used to accelerate drug discovery, the tools learn from huge databases of proven cement mixes and then apply their inferences to evaluate untested mixes.

Researchers from the University of Illinois and Chicago-based Ozinga, one of the largest private concrete producers in the United States, recently worked with Meta to feed 1,030 known concrete mixes into an AI. The project yielded a novel mix that will be used for sections of a data-center complex in DeKalb, Ill. The AI-derived concrete has a carbon footprint 40 percent lower than the conventional concrete used on the rest of the site. Ryan Cialdella, Ozinga's vice president of innovation, smiles as he notes the virtuous circle: AI systems that live in data centers can now help cut emissions from the concrete that houses them.

A sustainable foundation for the information age

Cheap, durable, and abundant yet unsustainable, concrete made with Portland cement has been one of modern technology's Faustian bargains. The built world is on track to double in floor space by 2060, adding 230,000 km², or more than half the area of California. Much of that will house the 2 billion more people we are likely to add to our numbers. As global transportation, telecom, energy, and computing networks grow, their new appendages will rest upon concrete. But if concrete doesn't change, we will perversely be forced to produce even more concrete to protect ourselves from the coming climate chaos, with its rising seas, fires, and extreme weather.

The AI-driven boom in data centers is a strange bargain of its own. In the future, AI may help us live even more prosperously, or it may undermine our freedoms, civilities, employment opportunities, and environment. But solutions to the bad climate bargain that AI's data centers foist on the planet are at hand, if there's a will to deploy them. Hyperscalers and governments are among the few organizations with the clout to rapidly change what kinds of cement and concrete the world uses, and how those are made. With a pivot to sustainability, concrete's unique scale makes it one of the few materials that could do most to protect the world's natural systems. We can't live without concrete-but with some ambitious reinvention, we can thrive with it.

This article was updated on 04 November 2024.