Concrete is integral to the data centers that bring our technologies and programs to life. At the same time, cement in concrete is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for approximately 8% of global emissions¹. As we focus on reducing our emissions and achieving net zero emissions across our value chain in 2030, we continue to explore new approaches to data center design to minimize the environmental impact of our infrastructure. 

The embodied carbon of concrete includes the emissions associated with its manufacturing, transportation and installation. We consider this entire lifecycle of concrete as we identify interventions to reduce emissions in our built environment, as well as working with our construction and industry partners to accelerate decarbonization in our own builds and beyond.

Our interventions to address the emissions in concrete include:

Designing with less

Often, the best way to reduce the carbon footprint of concrete is by not using it at all in certain applications. We eliminated the requirement to use concrete in electric and telecom duct banks in our latest data center design specifications. In some cases, this design streamlining has reduced the carbon footprint of concrete by over 30% compared to previous designs. We are conducting further analysis to reduce the total volume of poured concrete, such as by opting for gravel fill in certain areas or reducing slab thickness elsewhere.

Deploying low carbon concrete at scale

For areas of our data centers that still require concrete, we are piloting and deploying concrete that has significantly lower embodied carbon emissions. Adjusting the formula of inputs that constitute concrete — particularly by substituting cement with tried and tested alternatives such as fly ash and slag — can reduce the carbon footprint of this essential building material. We have analyzed the potential to deploy this low carbon concrete at scale after piloting pours at several sites where we are constructing new data centers. This analysis considers the technical and logistical feasibility of low carbon concrete in various applications, including local material supply chain constraints, time requirements for concrete curing, and minimum strength requirements. As a result, we have incorporated the use of low carbon concrete into our specifications for our latest data center designs, with support from leading industry experts like Arup and Ozinga. This requirement to use low carbon concrete will lower the carbon intensity of the concrete by up to 20% below regional industry baselines. Our team continues to test and pilot low carbon concrete deployment in additional applications in future builds, such as in the critical data hall floor slabs with guidance from Arup and Ozinga.

Partnering to accelerate low carbon concrete

Reducing the emissions from concrete at our data centers is a step forward, but in order for this sector to take the leaps needed to decarbonize concrete at scale, we are joining with industry partners to help further advance low carbon concrete.

In 2024, the Biden-Harris administration convened a first-of-its-kind Concrete Innovation Summit to accelerate commercialization of clean construction materials and build the momentum of increasing customer demand for lower emission products in the industrial sector. As part of this, we joined RMI and the Center for Green Market Activation’s Coordinated Corporate Action on Low-Emissions Concrete initiative. The effort links companies across the supply chain to take direct action on embodied carbon from concrete and cement through innovative, collaborative mechanisms like demand aggregation and book and claim systems. 

With Infrastructure Masons and over 70 companies including the largest data center operators, we formed the iMasons Climate Accord to reduce carbon in digital infrastructure materials, products, and power. The group has established an independent governing body to adopt or develop a standard methodology for measuring carbon in digital infrastructure, and will help accelerate decarbonization across a sector with equally ambitious goals for both hyperscaling technology and addressing climate change. Through iMasons, we have called on concrete suppliers to support greater transparency and provide Environmental Product Declarations, which are standardized documentation reporting the embodied emissions of their product. These labels, analogous to Energy Star ratings on appliances, are essential to enable data center operators to manage their emissions.

We also sponsored the American Concrete Institute’s Center of Excellence for Carbon Neutral Concrete to establish a framework for evaluating various low carbon concrete technologies and conduct a systematic assessment of these technologies based on technical performance, supply chain maturity, and environmental claims. 

We collaborated with the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) to complete a first-of-its-kind demonstration project to test four ultra-low carbon concrete solutions, with 30-50% lower emissions. OCP has committed to publishing the results of the project to spur further research and development. 

Investing in novel technologies

Novel technologies need increased financing today in order to become transformational solutions for reducing concrete emissions at scale. This year, we announced an agreement with CarbonBuilt to upgrade additional concrete masonry plants and scale production of its low carbon concrete. CarbonBuilt’s proprietary binder reacts with and stores CO₂ during the curing process, displacing carbon-intensive cement to reduce concrete’s carbon footprint by up to 70% compared to industry baselines.

We are also providing carbon finance to CarbiCrete to scale the production of cement-free concrete with a number of concrete manufacturers. CarbiCrete’s approach avoids cement-related emissions by replacing cement with a byproduct from the steelmaking process and further removes atmospheric carbon dioxide through carbon mineralization which is then stored in the concrete.

Leveraging open-source AI to advance low carbon concrete

Manually optimizing concrete mixes for multiple attributes, like strength, cure time and sustainability, can be challenging. To develop a model that could jointly maximize the performance and minimize the environmental impact of concrete, our AI researchers partnered with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to develop and train an AI model, generating hundreds of systematic data points via AI-driven iterative testing in the lab. The AI we developed leverages the Adaptive Experimentation and BoTorch toolboxes, which are used in Meta’s own backend infrastructure for tuning ranking models, optimizing user experience, increasing computing efficiency, and for optimizing the optics stack of AR and VR hardware.

As a result, this model can predict the strength curve of concrete mixtures and simultaneously optimize them for other attributes like sustainability and cure time. In lab testing, it can reduce emissions by up to 70% without sacrificing other requirements for construction feasibility. The model can also incorporate novel materials into the mixtures to help understand their viability for future approaches to high-performance, low carbon concrete. Our research continues to explore how this model can incorporate other factors into its formula predictions, such as ambient conditions that affect the performance of concrete, and learn the properties of novel materials. We are collaborating with building materials manufacturers like Holcim US, a leading cement and concrete manufacturer, to further optimize the design and development of low carbon concrete.  

Open-sourcing our research and AI models for low carbon concrete helps expand the adoption of new materials and approaches that reduce the carbon footprint of our built environment. Open sourcing also allows collaboration with other climate leaders in the industrial sector to fine tune their applications of low carbon concrete. 

Looking ahead

Our vision is to help reduce the cost and carbon footprint of large-scale construction initiatives across the world by sharing our research and efforts to advance decarbonization of concrete. We have much more work to do to continue the acceleration of low carbon concrete on our path to net zero, and we invite partners from manufacturers to data center operators to join us in the number of opportunities ahead to address concrete emissions.

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¹ World Economic Forum