Its main aims are to develop better speech-recognition tools, automatically translate between different languages, and help build a 3D virtual metaverse, but the company is also using AI to work on projects such as concrete production.
The company says that this construction material is a major contributor to its carbon footprint as it builds data centers around the world for its online services. The emissions of the ‘novel’ concrete described in the paper essentially correspond to Swiss average concrete in terms of emissions today, he says.
One of the new concrete mixtures is being used in limited parts of Meta’s new data center in DeKalb, Illinois. “I doubt that this is US industry-standard today – it would be embarrassing if it were,” he says.
The AI-derived mixtures are certainly effective, but not novel, says Kaufmann. The company said in a blog post that manually discovering such mixtures would be challenging, but that its AI approach completed the task “within weeks”. Cement is responsible for a large part of concrete’s carbon emissions, so alternatives to this component with a smaller but still sizeable carbon footprint such as fly ash, a by-product of burning coal, and slag, which is a by-product of manufacturing steel, are commonly used.
To train an AI model to find the optimal recipe for a given use, Meta researchers used a resource that lists various properties of 1030 different concrete mixtures called the Concrete Compressive Strength Data Set. The AI was then able to compare all possible concrete mixtures and find examples that matched a minimum given strength, but also had the lowest possible emissions.
Meta took the five most promising mixtures and tested them in a laboratory. In a paper outlining the research, the authors say coming up with such mixtures is “pushing the boundary of human creativity”.
Walter Kaufmann at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich says that the claimed reduction in carbon emissions is calculated in comparison with concrete made using pure Portland cement produced entirely with fossil fuel energy and no replacement material at all. But experts say that concrete mixtures with similar emissions are already in use across Europe and that constructing new buildings is incompatible with reducing carbon pollution.
Meta is investing heavily in AI research, including building the world’s most powerful AI-specific supercomputer. Meta has used AI to develop concrete that emits 40 percent less carbon, but researchers say that other concrete mixtures can already achieve that
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has used AI to develop a new way of creating concrete which it claims produces 40 percent fewer carbon emissions than standard mixtures, and is already using it in its latest data center. It’s that simple, he says.
This includes the strength of each concrete after curing for a week and a month, and its carbon footprint. Commercial concrete can contain dozens or even hundreds of ingredients to achieve a desired strength or durability. The production and use of concrete are responsible for around 8 percent of global carbon emissions.
Basic concrete is a mix of cement and an aggregate such as gravel, mixed with water. “Based on a life cycle assessment of our typical data center design, we have concluded that concrete is a significant contributor to our embodied carbon emissions, and hence the need to find low-carbon solutions for concrete”, says Julius Kusama, a researcher at Meta.
At the University of Leeds, UK, says that minimizing cement content in concrete has been a goal of manufacturers for some time because it is the most expensive part of the mixture and that minimizing carbon emissions, in reality, means not creating new buildings.
You can fiddle around at the edges of cement contents, using a bit less energy and all the rest of it, but at the end of the day, if you want to decarbonize the built environment, stop building stuff. “In Western Europe, concretes similar to the one referenced as ‘industry standard’ in the paper stopped being used 25 years ago
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