Google, Anthropic, and others pledge $915m for carbon removal

With financial support from several other tech giants, Google has committed $915 million in new funding for carbon removal through the purchase of carbon removal credits.

Chipping in are Stripe, Google, Shopify, Salesforce, H&M Group, and Anthropic, which will contribute via Google's Frontier advance market commitment (AMC), made in 2022, to buy $1 billion of carbon removal by 2030.

The goal, Google said, is to spur innovation by sending a clear demand signal to researchers, entrepreneurs, and investors that there is a growing market for these technologies.

"Our renewed support helps scale novel climate solutions that benefit both ecosystems and communities – ranging from improving soil health through enhanced rock weathering to strengthening local economies through biomass carbon removal," said Randy Spock, Google's head of carbon credits and removals.

Latest Videos From

Watch full video here:

"These long-duration removals fold into our broader climate solutions portfolio, which includes restoring natural ecosystems and eliminating superpollutants. Together, these approaches are more than the sum of their parts; they can be combined to neutralize the warming impact of emissions over every timescale."

The company is focusing its efforts on two main areas. On the supply side, it plans to concentrate purchases on a narrower portfolio of companies where, it said, it's thoroughly convinced that the technology has gigaton-scale potential.

On the demand side, meanwhile, it will require every deal to have a clear line of sight to robust, long-term demand, be it compliance markets, industrial regulation, or direct government procurement.

The program includes methods such as enhanced rock weathering (ERW), inland water alkalinity enhancement (IWAE), ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE), biomass injection, and waste-to-energy with carbon capture.

"Surficial mineralization and ocean alkalinity enhancement have the potential to be huge and low cost, but outstanding technology risks mean large error bars on both metrics," said Google.

"Biomass-based approaches and enhanced rock weathering are capped in their scale potential, and the cost of direct air capture is likely to remain relatively high, but these technologies are better understood and enjoy more existing policy support."

Currently, it's Microsoft that's the world's largest buyer of carbon removals by far: in fiscal year 2025, it signed agreements to remove a record 45 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide with 21 companies across the globe.

But over the last four years, said Google, Frontier firms have also made a great deal of progress. Last year, seven portfolio companies delivered around 23,000 tons – roughly twice as much as the year before, and broke ground on 1.4 million tons of new annual removal capacity. This year, Frontier portfolio companies are forecasting more than 50,000 tons removed.

"Hundreds of companies are being built, and tens of thousands of tons have been delivered. We have real-world data across most major pathways and growing confidence in which technologies could be a meaningful part of a gigaton-scale future. The major question now is whether demand will materialize at the magnitude required," said the firm.

"To get to gigaton-scale, companies and governments will need to work in concert. Policy takes years to develop, and governments are best served by a range of proven, derisked technologies. Corporate buyers bridge that gap, providing the reliable revenue companies need today to get their technologies to commercial scale."