FILE: A sign at Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, in March 2022. Photo: LPS.1 / Wikimedia Commons, CC0; cropped and resized.
Meta has signed a multi-year agreement with Sublime Systems aimed at supporting new U.S. production of lower-carbon cement and giving the technology company priority access to the material for future data centers, Sublime announced Thursday.
The agreement includes environmental attribute certificates associated with at least 180,000 tons of Sublime Cement production. Those certificates allow a buyer to support the environmental benefits of producing a material. They should not be confused with a statement that Meta has already taken delivery of 180,000 tons of cement.
Sublime said the arrangement is intended to help support construction of a new U.S. plant. Its first commercial plant remains in development, and deliveries are expected to come from its first commercial factories. The announcement did not disclose a contract value or delivery dates.
The deal addresses a less visible part of the data-center construction boom: the materials used to build the facilities, rather than the chips and electricity needed to run them.
“Cement is one of the hardest parts of our infrastructure footprint to address,” Meta’s head of net zero strategy, Devon Lake, said in the announcement. He said the agreement would help expand production and enable potential future use in Meta’s data centers.
Sublime makes cement using an electrochemical process powered by electricity rather than conventional fossil-fueled kilns. The company says the process avoids emissions associated with conventional cement manufacturing. The announcement did not provide an independently verified emissions reduction for this particular agreement.
The distinction between certificates and physical deliveries matters. Sublime said the agreement grants Meta priority access to use the cement in its construction projects, while the certificate purchases are linked to production verified by an accredited third party. That is a commitment to support supply, not proof that a new plant is already operating or that a data center has already been built with the material.
Sublime, which was spun out of MIT in 2020, said it is also working with established cement producers on sites, engineering and construction for commercial plants.
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