Today’s ESG Updates
- Ocean Competition to Solve Climate Change: By 2050, emerging marine carbon removal techniques might extract an additional eight billion tonnes a year, turning the sea into a far larger climate ally.
- UK AI Hardware Plan: With the AI chip market projected to hit $1 trillion by the early 2030s, calculations indicate that capturing just 5% would inject £50 billion into the UK economy.
- US Data Centres in Droughts: A new analysis shows that roughly two-thirds of the 809 planned US data centers are slated for regions that have spent the past year parched.
- Waymo Aids Grid Storage: Alphabet’s company plans to repurpose their used EV batteries for grid storage, due to their use even after the end of life for the vehicle itself.
Ocean has a giant potential to provide a solution for climate change
The oceans already swallow roughly a quarter of humanity’s annual CO2 emissions, 2.4 billion tonnes, but scientists believe the water could do far more. By 2050, emerging marine carbon removal techniques might extract an additional eight billion tonnes a year, turning the sea into a far larger climate ally.
Engineered solutions, such as those developed by Captura, Planetary Technologies, and CarbonRun, use electrochemistry or mineral additives to strip CO2 from seawater or rivers, allowing the ocean to draw down more from the atmosphere. Engineered methods offer greater permanence and easier measurement, yet remain technologically complex and expensive.
Nature-based approaches rely on mangroves, seagrass, and seaweed, which store carbon at rates that can rival or exceed those of tropical forests while buffering coastlines against storms. These projects are cheaper but vulnerable to reversal—development or extreme weather can wipe out a mangrove forest overnight, sending stored carbon back into the air. Rigorous measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) is therefore the industry’s obsession, with registries like Isometric issuing conservative protocols to ensure “a tonne is a tonne.”
Despite these hurdles, private capital is flowing. Frontier Climate—backed by Stripe, Google, and Shopify—has committed tens of millions to engineered removal, including a $30 million deal with Planetary Technologies and $25.4 million to CarbonRun. The Symbiosis coalition, which counts Meta and McKinsey among its members, is meanwhile scouting for mangrove projects. Even so, the Trump administration’s cuts to federal marine research have pushed much of the momentum into industry hands. However, a bipartisan congressional bill and new coalitions such as the mCDR Coalition are working to keep federal support alive.
***
Further reading: The race to bolster the ocean’s potential to combat climate change
Klimado – Navigating climate complexity just got easier. Klimado offers a user-friendly platform for tracking local and global environmental shifts, making it an essential tool for climate-aware individuals and organizations.
UK bets more than £1B on AI hardware
The British government has unveiled a £1.1 billion AI Hardware Plan, a sweeping industrial strategy designed to anchor the UK’s place in the global semiconductor race while reducing dependence on foreign chipmakers. Unveiled by Technology Secretary Liz Kendall at London Tech Week, the plan rests on three pillars: raw computing power, homegrown chip design, and a desperately needed skills pipeline.
The headline commitment is £750 million for a national AI supercomputer — intended as one of the world’s most advanced when it goes live in 2030. Crucially, £400 million of that is earmarked for next-generation chips, with £150 million reserved as an advance market commitment to purchase novel inference processors from British startups and established players such as Arm. The government is effectively acting as a guaranteed first customer, de-risking innovation in a sector where a single design cycle can cost millions and take years.
Beyond procurement, £120 million will fund an AI Hardware Innovation Program to help domestic firms prototype and test new designs. In comparison, at least £20 million will expand the Scaling Inference Lab—already yielding tangible results, such as Oriole Networks’ light-based chip interconnect developed with AMD. On the skills front, £45 million in new funding supports doctoral training and undergraduate bursaries, bringing total government skills support to £80 million. A new £12 million Center for Doctoral Training in Chip Design and a strategic partnership with Arm through the TechFirst program aim to prevent the brain drain that has historically plagued British tech.
The plan also brings Silicon Valley muscle to UK shores: Playground Global, whose partners include former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, will lead a new venture fund backed by up to £150 million from the British Business Bank—the largest single commitment the bank has ever made. Playground will also open its first non-US office in Britain.
***
Further reading: A decisive shift to power British AI: new £1.1 billion plan to back chip firms, boost computing power and skills for the AI revolution
Related Articles
Here is a list of articles selected by our Editorial Board that have gained significant interest from the public:
Most new US data centres are planned in drought areas
America’s artificial intelligence boom is colliding with its worst spring drought in modern records. A Guardian analysis revealed that roughly two-thirds of the 809 planned US data centers are slated for regions that have spent the past year parched, even as the industry’s thirst is projected to surge from 17 billion gallons annually in 2023 to 73 billion gallons by 2028. A single large facility can consume five million gallons daily—enough for a town of 50,000 people—while researchers estimate that every 100-word AI prompt burns through roughly half a liter of water in cooling costs.
The industry is drawn to these dry landscapes by cheap land, generous tax breaks, and the belief that arid air reduces equipment corrosion. Yet, more than 60 percent of the contiguous United States is already in drought, and developers are planting power-hungry campuses in Utah, Texas, and Washington counties where reservoirs are shrinking, and aquifers are stressed. In Utah, the gargantuan Stratos complex—twice the size of Manhattan and backed by television personality Kevin O’Leary—has united farmers, environmentalists, and rural conservatives against a project they fear will push the already imperilled Great Salt Lake closer to collapse.
***
Further reading: Majority of US’s new AI datacenters to be built on drought-hit land
Batteries from self-driving cars to support grids
Waymo, the Alphabet-owned autonomous driving company, has partnered with B2U Storage Solutions to give retired electric vehicle batteries from its robotaxi fleet a second life as grid-scale energy storage. EV batteries often outlast the vehicles themselves and retain significant capacity even after retirement. The decision to use that otherwise wasted power is a perfect example of a sustainability-driven initiative.
Rather than sending them straight to recycling, Waymo will deploy them in Texas and California as stationary battery storage systems managed by B2U, which will handle the batteries through their second life and eventual recycling. The companies frame this as a cost-effective, circular-economy alternative to building new storage systems from scratch, while providing grid stability as electricity demand grows.
***
Further reading: Alphabet’s Waymo to Repurpose Used EV Batteries for Grid Storage
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by the authors are their own, not those of impakter.com — In the Cover Photo: A polluted beach. Cover Photo Credit: Ron Lach.
