The Future of Data Center Technologies

Orbital started with a single hypothesis: AI will dramatically change how we develop advanced materials. Since our founding, we’ve continually developed and released the world's fastest and most accurate AI models for advanced materials design, used by scientists around the world to accelerate the discovery of catalysts, semiconductors, batteries, and climate technologies.

Our ambition, however, has always been to go further – to develop physical products and bring them to scale. We believe the highest leverage place for us to focus our energies is developing advanced materials that make scaling AI faster, cheaper, and more sustainable. Superintelligence may be humanity's single most important discovery — our technologies aim to make it abundant the day we discover it.

That’s why over the past year we have focused our efforts on new advanced materials to decarbonise and improve the efficiency of data centers. Since setting up our lab at the beginning of this year, we’ve used our AI platform to design, synthesise and test new prototypes at a faster rate than ever before. In carbon removal alone, we saw a performance improvement of 10x.

We know that for materials improvement to transfer into on-the-ground performance gains, they need to be tightly integrated into the equipment and overall engineering design. For that reason, we’ve built out our process engineering team and developed new ways to optimise and accelerate process design with AI.

These efforts have borne fruit at unprecedented speed. We’re excited to announce that we’ve formed a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to supercharge these efforts for our carbon removal and cooling products, only 12 months after kicking off initial materials discovery (AWS Press Release).

Orbital’s most advanced technology is in carbon removal. It utilises the waste products - especially heat - generated by data centers. By tailoring our sponge-like AI-designed material to the unique operating conditions generated by these waste products our system is able to significantly reduce the operating and capital costs of deploying direct air capture. We expect to deploy and test our first carbon removal system integrated with a data center  at the end of 2025.

Our next-generation cooling technologies are in the early stages of development. They aim to significantly reduce the energy costs of cooling energy intensive chips while also improving maintainability, reducing downtime and ensuring safety. We’re looking forward to talking more about our efforts in 2025.

AI is changing the way we develop and commercialise new advanced materials technologies. We’re excited to be using it to bring about safe and sustainable abundance as fast as possible. I’m extraordinarily proud of the progress of the team, breaking new ground every day.