Source: Axios
NTT Data's purchase of Climeworks carbon removal credits shows major infrastructure providers treating offset spending as an operational cost of scaling AI, not a peripheral sustainability gesture. Data center operators have accepted they cannot engineer their way to carbon neutrality fast enough to match GPU demand growth, forcing them to outsource the gap to nascent carbon removal technology at scale. Buying credits is cheaper and faster than overhauling power infrastructure or migrating workloads, which means carbon removal startups now have a direct revenue model tied to the explosive economics of generative AI.