In defense of the low-carbon cement beneath Meta's ocean-boiling AI servers

I have spent three decades screaming into the void about the melting ice caps, only to be met with the deafening silence of a species committed to its own eradication. So when I saw that Meta had struck a deal to help bring a low-carbon cement plant to Missouri, I finally felt a glimmer of hope. At last, the physical infrastructure that will house our inevitable AI-driven demise is going to be LEED-certified.

The partnership with the clean-tech startup Fortera is exactly the kind of corporate leadership I have been begging for. Tech companies are currently racing to build gargantuan data centers to power the next generation of artificial intelligence, a project that requires pouring millions of tons of concrete. Historically, cement production has been a massive driver of global carbon output. But Fortera’s process captures carbon dioxide from the kiln exhaust and mineralizes it. Missouri is about to become ground zero for eco-conscious doom, and frankly, it is a milestone we should be celebrating.

Naturally, the professional complainers are already finding fault. They will loudly point out that a single AI query requires nearly ten times the electricity of a standard web search, and that Meta’s sprawling new facilities will place a crushing burden on the local power grid. They will argue that building a sustainable warehouse to house servers that require restarting dormant fossil fuel plants is an absurd contradiction. As predicted, these activists are letting perfect be the enemy of the marginally less terrible. Who cares if the server farm is incinerating the local utility grid if the concrete slab beneath it is forty percent less carbon-intensive?

I was recently having a private lunch with a vice president of sustainability at COP28—over a delightful, locally-sourced endive salad—and we laughed about the naivety of the environmental left. The activists still believe reducing overall energy consumption is a viable path forward. The reality is that the transition to a modern economy is going to require building massive, energy-guzzling monuments to machine learning. If we can build those monuments using slightly better limestone, I consider that a profound victory.

Let us look at the actual math of scope-three emissions. By intervening directly in the supply chain to secure green cement, Meta is aggressively tackling the one percent of its footprint that comes from pouring the foundation. The other ninety-nine percent—the emissions generated by running tens of thousands of processors around the clock to train a language model that hallucinates historical facts and optimizes targeted ads for athletic socks? That is simply the cost of doing business in the digital age.

We are talking about server farms designed to calculate billions of parameters a second so that a consumer can instantly generate a synthetic image of a dog riding a skateboard. This is vital, civilization-defining work. It demands a permanent physical footprint, and Meta is taking the brave step of ensuring that footprint is poured responsibly.

The environmental benefits extend far beyond the kiln. Think of the water. Artificial intelligence data centers require millions of gallons of fresh water daily just to keep the server racks from melting down. Yes, the local agricultural community in Missouri might experience a few unforeseen droughts as the aquifers are drained to cool the processors. But when those farmers gaze upon the striking, low-carbon façade of the facility that drank their livelihood, they will surely appreciate the reduction in embodied carbon.

And cement is just the beginning. The entire tech sector is now hunting for so-called green steel to build the internal skeletons of these computation fortresses. It is a beautiful, holistic synergy. We are extracting rare earth metals, shipping them across the globe on diesel freighters, and assembling them into servers that will eventually generate an artificial image of a pristine forest, all housed securely within a beautifully sustainable steel cage.

Imagine the Missouri landscape in ten years. Rolling, parched hills, a few dry riverbeds, and a shimmering, low-carbon concrete fortress quietly consuming the energy output of a mid-sized developing nation. The purists can whine about the electrical grid all they want. I, for one, will sleep soundly knowing that when the final climate boundary is breached, the servers recording the event will have a pristine carbon footprint on their drywall.