{"id":275708,"date":"2025-07-19T21:21:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T21:21:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/275708\/"},"modified":"2025-07-19T21:21:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-19T21:21:11","slug":"microsoft-buys-more-than-a-billion-dollars-worth-of-excrement-including-human-poop-to-clean-up-its-ai-mess-company-will-pump-waste-underground-to-offset-ai-carbon-emissions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/275708\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft buys more than a billion dollars\u2019 worth of excrement, including human poop, to clean up its AI mess \u2014 company will pump waste underground to offset AI carbon emissions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Microsoft<\/a> has just signed a deal with Vaulted Deep, paying it to remove 4.9 million metric tons of waste over 12 years sourced from manure, sewage, and agricultural byproducts for injection deep underground. According to Inc.<\/a>, the current cost of CO2 removal with the company is $350 per ton. If you multiply that by Microsoft\u2019s contract, that makes it worth more than $1.7 billion. However, neither entity has disclosed the actual terms of the deal, and its CEO, Julia Reichelstein, says that the company expects its costs to drop over time, and that the mentioned price isn\u2019t the actual sum that the tech giant paid.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the first time Redmond has paid another company to help offset its greenhouse gas emissions; Microsoft signed a deal with AtmosClear in April of this year to sequester 6.75 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. However, Vaulted\u2019s technique is unique \u2014 instead of extracting carbon dioxide from the air or electricity production, it collects organic waste. It combines it into a thick slurry, which is then injected about 5,000 feet underground. This prevents it from being dumped at a waste disposal site, where it would eventually decompose and release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.<\/p>\n

\u201cGenerally, what happens to these wastes today is they go to a landfill, they get dumped in a waterway, or they\u2019re just spread on land for the purpose of disposal. In all of those cases, they\u2019re decomposing into CO2 and methane,\u201d said Reichelstein to Inc. \u201cThat\u2019s contributing to climate change. And then oftentimes, especially when it\u2019s spread on land, all those pathogens are going directly into people\u2019s groundwater.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Projects such as these enable Microsoft and other tech giants to offset the massive amounts of carbon emissions produced by data centers, particularly as they consume a significant amount of electrical power, often generated from fossil fuels. For example, Musk is facing legal action in Memphis, Tennessee, after his company, xAI, is accused of polluting the air by using under-reported power generators<\/a> at the Colossus Supercomputer. Aside from that, many companies, including Microsoft, Google<\/a>, Amazon<\/a>, Oracle, and others, are investing in small modular reactor research to establish their clean energy sources for their expanding data center businesses.<\/p>\n

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