Brief
Artificial intelligence is being applied to concrete mixtures to reduce their carbon emissions at Facebook parent Meta’s new data center in Dekalb, Ill. Meta says it’s encouraged by testing of the slab-on-grade concrete’s performance in a joint project with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Illinois-based concrete supplier Ozinga Bros.
Insight
The concrete industry, according to a 2020 Princeton University report, is responsible for 8% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions due to the process of making cement, which is a key ingredient in concrete.As a result, each pound of concrete, according to the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association, releases 0.93 pounds of CO2.
Given that there are an estimated 10 billion tons of concrete produced each year, it’s easy to see why those interested in a more sustainable construction industry would try to produce an environment-friendly concrete product.
Meta’s experiment, which explored how sustainability could be achieved while maintaining slab-on-grade concrete performance at its data center in Dekalb, Illinois, was carried out in conjunction with researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and concrete supplier Ozinga Bros. Inc., headquartered in Mokena, Illinois.
Meta also announced on Wednesday that it would double the size of its Dekalb location with three more data centers, bringing the total number to five and upping the company’s investment in Dekalb to more than $1 billion.
Using conditional variational autoencoders (CVAEs), a semi-supervised generative AI model, the team created five concrete formulas that Ozinga used to produce field-ready concrete. Ozinga, according to the Meta report, factored in local conditions and other variables – based on the concrete company’s expertise – into the final field formulations.
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