Microsoft buys more than a billion dollars’ worth of excrement, including human poop, to clean up its AI mess — company will pump waste underground to offset AI carbon emissions

Microsoft has just signed a deal with Vaulted Deep, paying it to remove 4.9 million metric tons of waste over 12 years sourced from manure, sewage, and agricultural byproducts for injection deep underground. According to Inc., the current cost of CO2 removal with the company is $350 per ton. If you multiply that by Microsoft’s contract, that makes it worth more than $1.7 billion. However, neither entity has disclosed the actual terms of the deal, and its CEO, Julia Reichelstein, says that the company expects its costs to drop over time, and that the mentioned price isn’t the actual sum that the tech giant paid.

This isn’t the first time Redmond has paid another company to help offset its greenhouse gas emissions; Microsoft signed a deal with AtmosClear in April of this year to sequester 6.75 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. However, Vaulted’s technique is unique — instead of extracting carbon dioxide from the air or electricity production, it collects organic waste. It combines it into a thick slurry, which is then injected about 5,000 feet underground. This prevents it from being dumped at a waste disposal site, where it would eventually decompose and release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.