- Microsoft pays billions to inject fertilizer underground to cancel AI carbon emissions
- Vaulted deep swing wastewater and fertilizer to a climate was buried 5,000 feet down
- Carbon offset prices may fall but right now each ton cost around $ 350
Microsoft once again uses strongly on carbon removal – but this time the strategy is not based on futuristic machines or carbon -scrubbing forests, but instead involves waste, specifically human and expensive excrement, fertilizer and agricultural bi -products.
The company has entered into a multi -year agreement with the vault deep to dispose of this organic material by injecting it underground.
The method is designed to prevent degradation from releasing carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere.
An underground solution to an atmospheric problem
According to Inc., Vaulted Deep will handle the funeral of 4.9 million tonnes of waste over the next 12 years.
While the company allegedly charges $ 350 per Ton for carbon removal, clarified CEO Julia Reichelstein, “The aforementioned price is not the actual sum the technical giant paid” and added that costs are expected to fall over time.
Still, if the quoted price was accurate, the deal could exceed $ 1.7 billion in value, but currently no accurate number of any of the pages has been revealed.
The rationale behind this method is rooted in preventing the harmful effects of current waste practice.
“In general, what happens to these garbage today is that they go to a landfill, they are dumped in a waterway, or they are just scattered on land for disposal. In all these cases, they break down to CO2 and methane,” Reichelstein said.
“It contributes to climate change. And then often, especially when it spreads on land, all these pathogens go directly into people’s groundwater.”
Vaulted Deep’s process involves the transformation of waste into a dense slurry and then pumping it more than 5,000 feet below the surface.
This approach not only locks the material away from the atmosphere, but also bypasses the organic risks associated with disposal on the surface.
The idea may seem unconventional, but it fits into a wider pattern of tech companies that shrink by scalable carbon shift strategies.
Microsoft, along with other cloud giants such as Google and Amazon, confronts the environmental cost of data centers, facilities that require massive energy input, often from sources to fossil fuel.
With AI workloads that intensify this requirement, the need to find creative mitigation solutions has grown urgently.
Earlier in 2025, Microsoft also collaborated with atmosclear to sequest 6.75 million tons of carbon dioxide, showing its willingness to explore different strategies.
That said, it is unclear how scalable or sustainable waste-to-carbon-offset method will be in the long term, especially if the costs remain high and public view becomes critical.
Via Tomshardware
