Meta used AI to concoct low-carbon concrete it poured for a datacenter floor

Social media giant Meta has created an AI model to come up with new forms of concrete and used one of the resulting recipes to underpin a new bit barn.

Like any entity that builds datacenters, Meta needs concrete – many square miles of it for the fleet of gigawatt-scale facilities it announced earlier this week. The company is also keen to reduce its carbon footprint, an ambition that concrete complicates because the substance is thought to contribute perhaps ten percent of CO2 emissions.

Meta is not alone in wanting greener concrete – The Register last year reported the Open Compute Project’s (OCP’s) efforts to develop and test low-carbon concrete.

Tests of such substances are necessary because subtle changes to the recipe for concrete can change its performance, and datacenters are demanding environments in which heat and vibration are constant.

Meta observed the OCP’s efforts last year, but was ...