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Time of India
23-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Why Microsoft just signed a deal for green cement
Microsoft Corp. is partnering with Sublime Systems to reduce its indirect greenhouse gas emissions through a first-of-a-kind deal to buy low-carbon cement products from the startup. Under the contract, Microsoft can purchase up to 622,500 metric tons of Sublime's cement over a period of six to nine years. Microsoft can claim the carbon reductions associated with that cement in its own emissions accounting, even if it doesn't use the material itself. If Microsoft passes on buying the product, the Somerville, Massachusetts-based Sublime can sell it to local buyers but the software giant still gets to claim the carbon savings. Sublime uses an electrochemical process that eliminates limestone, which is cement's main ingredient and releases carbon dioxide when it's heated up and broken down. Microsoft's push to build more data centre s supporting artificial intelligence has driven the company further away from its goal of becoming carbon-negative by 2030. That AI expansion has helped boost the tech giant's emissions by 30% since 2020. More than 96% of the company's emissions are Scope 3, or indirect, and materials like cement used in data centre construction make up a big share of them. It's Microsoft's first time doing a deal like this for building materials, though the company and others have used the same approach for sustainable aviation fuel and renewable energy. Called an environmental attribute certificate, it allows the purchasing company to make a sustainability claim based on environmentally friendly goods — like clean jet fuel, renewable electricity or low-carbon cement — that it didn't use directly. But these certificates often promise more than they deliver, research shows. 'Our priority, first and foremost, is always buying and installing low-carbon materials physically that are already on the market today,' said Katie Ross, Microsoft's director of carbon reduction strategy and market development. 'But the challenge is they don't exist at the scale or in all of the locations that we need to procure today.' The companies declined to say how much the deal is worth. The challenges of green cement It's not just a Microsoft problem. Although cement accounts for about 8% of global emissions, it's hard to decarbonise partly because construction is a risk-averse industry with thin margins and high safety standards, according to Nik Sawe, a senior policy analyst in the industry program at Energy Innovation Policy and Technology LLC, an energy and climate think tank. That means construction companies have been reluctant to take up cement alternatives developed by startups, which are cleaner but also currently more expensive and untested in the real world. At its 250-ton-per-year pilot plant in Somerville, Sublime has reduced emissions by 90% compared to traditional cement, according to Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Leah Ellis. Sublime will start delivering on its deal with Microsoft when its first 30,000-ton commercial plant is operational. It's slated to be completed in 2027. Cement is heavy, and transporting it over long distances doesn't make sense economically, Ellis said. The deal allows Microsoft to support the scale-up of Sublime's technology even if it doesn't have a construction project near the startup's plant, she added. Do environmental attribute certificates work? In the past, some of these certificates have supported renewable projects that would have been developed anyway, meaning they didn't help bring additional wind and solar online as promised, studies show. Microsoft has said it plans to phase out its use of unbundled renewable energy certificates in future years. If deals like the one the company signed with Sublime proliferate, the clean cement industry will need to prove that the certificates it is offering are verifiable and avoid carbon emissions that manufacturers would have generated otherwise, according to a 2024 report on structuring demand for lower-carbon materials co-published by RMI and Microsoft. That includes ensuring that the products' environmental benefits aren't double-counted, or claimed by multiple entities as a reduction on their emissions ledger. 'Checks must be in place along the way to increase confidence that every purchase of a certificate will deliver its expected outcome,' the report's authors wrote. For this deal with Microsoft, other customers who buy Sublime's cement won't be able to lay claim to its environmental benefits, Ellis said.
NDTV
23-05-2025
- Business
- NDTV
These AI Tools Will Help Sort Your Post-Vacation Inbox
While planning a nine-day trip to Japan with her family earlier this spring, Lindsey Scrase was anxious to avoid the stress of work piling up in her absence. For most of her career, getting away has inevitably meant back-to-back catch-up meetings and an overflowing inbox upon return. "I want to really unplug this time," she said before the 11-hour flight. So for the first time, the chief operating officer at Checkr Inc., a San Francisco-based background-screening company, decided to outsource the slog of reentry to artificial intelligence. Not too long ago, most white-collar workers could head out on vacation without fearing the email hangover that awaited them-originally, because messages weren't accessible on everyone's phones yet and, even after, because 9-to-5 boundaries were better established. But today's always-on workplace cultures-accelerated by the rise of remote work-have blurred those lines. Now a growing number of companies have rolled out tools designed to quickly catch up busy managers and staff who (gasp!) mute alerts on holiday. Microsoft Corp.'s Copilot, one of the most prominent offerings, costs users $30 a month, while Google's Gemini and Atlassian Corp.'s Rovo are bundled with enterprise subscriptions; the latter now counts 1.5 million monthly AI users, up 50% from the previous quarter. "One of the barriers to taking vacation is you don't want to miss things or be a bottleneck," says Melanie Rosenwasser, chief people officer at Dropbox Inc., which has expanded beyond its core file-storage business into AI offerings, including ones that help with post-vacation reentry. "These tools remove some of that guilt." (Never much of a vacationer before adopting the tools herself, she recently took a five-day trip to Tampa, Florida, for Yankees spring training.) Sandra Humbles, chief learning officer at pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson, says AI has helped her draw firmer boundaries around work for about a year now. "I've got 30% of my time back," she says, crediting Copilot with automating tasks like email triage and project planning. The shift has made it easier for Humbles, who lives in Dallas, to log off fully during weekends and time off. "You get back up to speed in 10 minutes." Humbles credits her "digital specialist"-a younger, tech-savvy colleague whom others might call an executive assistant-for helping her adopt the tools early. Some executives have pressure-tested AI tools over even longer breaks. When Erin DeCesare, chief technology officer at office catering company ezCater Inc. in Boston, took a six-week sabbatical from Thanksgiving to New Year's, she started her catch-up process by giving AI startup Glean Technologies Inc.'s tool a simple prompt: "Give me a synopsis of all my key team Slack channels and meeting transcripts-what's still outstanding, what are people worried about?" She followed up with several additional prompts to the bot, which had access to her messaging platforms and documents. Soon, DeCesare had a one-page readout of key decisions made while she was out, as well as a sentiment analysis of her colleagues' communications that allowed her to quickly figure out what was most urgent. "I knew what to prioritize from Day 1," she says. "That gave me a ton of peace of mind." The market for AI productivity tools was valued at almost $9 billion last year and is projected to surpass $36 billion globally by 2030, according to Grand View Research Inc. It's just one of the millions of ways, big and small, that AI is changing the way we do our jobs. Still, despite the buzz, overall adoption of such products remains limited: Just 16% of American workers say they use AI on the job, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Not everyone wants AI reading all their correspondence, for one. For workers handling sensitive or confidential information-such as HR professionals, legal teams or client-facing executives-the idea of such a tool combing through private messages raises red flags about data exposure and compliance risk. Also a challenge: AI tools still struggle with tone, sarcasm and context, making it risky to have them summarize threads or suggest responses. And even the most advanced programs have blind spots, especially in fast-moving workplaces where not every conversation is recorded (which, some would argue, isn't necessarily a bad thing). For AI to work smoothly, key meetings need to be transcribed, and decisions must be captured in places the tools can actually read, not at watercoolers or in hallways where they may be hashed out. DeCesare says she realized the AI missed things shared only in direct conversations, such as employee successes, so she created a dedicated teamwide kudos channel on Slack where workers could post achievements, allowing the AI to gather not only what's going sideways but also what's going well. The process saved time, she says. "What was amazing about this is that none of my team had to put status updates together for me," DeCesare says. "That would've been a huge lift for the team in the past." For Scrase, Checkr's COO, trialing the tools during her Japan trip paid off. AI summarized her Slack threads and calls, helping her jump back into work quickly. It also proved to be a savvy assistant even outside the office-where it planned parts of the trip itself, she says, down to which side of the train to sit on for the best views of Mount Fuji. (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
Time of India
23-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Why Microsoft just signed a deal for green cement
Microsoft Corp. is partnering with Sublime Systems to reduce its indirect greenhouse gas emissions through a first-of-a-kind deal to buy low-carbon cement products from the startup. Under the contract, Microsoft can purchase up to 622,500 metric tons of Sublime's cement over a period of six to nine years. Microsoft can claim the carbon reductions associated with that cement in its own emissions accounting, even if it doesn't use the material itself. If Microsoft passes on buying the product, the Somerville, Massachusetts-based Sublime can sell it to local buyers but the software giant still gets to claim the carbon savings. Sublime uses an electrochemical process that eliminates limestone, which is cement's main ingredient and releases carbon dioxide when it's heated up and broken down. Microsoft's push to build more data centre s supporting artificial intelligence has driven the company further away from its goal of becoming carbon-negative by 2030. That AI expansion has helped boost the tech giant's emissions by 30% since 2020. More than 96% of the company's emissions are Scope 3, or indirect, and materials like cement used in data centre construction make up a big share of them. It's Microsoft's first time doing a deal like this for building materials, though the company and others have used the same approach for sustainable aviation fuel and renewable energy. Called an environmental attribute certificate, it allows the purchasing company to make a sustainability claim based on environmentally friendly goods — like clean jet fuel, renewable electricity or low-carbon cement — that it didn't use directly. But these certificates often promise more than they deliver, research shows. 'Our priority, first and foremost, is always buying and installing low-carbon materials physically that are already on the market today,' said Katie Ross, Microsoft's director of carbon reduction strategy and market development. 'But the challenge is they don't exist at the scale or in all of the locations that we need to procure today.' The companies declined to say how much the deal is worth. The challenges of green cement It's not just a Microsoft problem. Although cement accounts for about 8% of global emissions, it's hard to decarbonise partly because construction is a risk-averse industry with thin margins and high safety standards, according to Nik Sawe, a senior policy analyst in the industry program at Energy Innovation Policy and Technology LLC, an energy and climate think tank. That means construction companies have been reluctant to take up cement alternatives developed by startups, which are cleaner but also currently more expensive and untested in the real world. At its 250-ton-per-year pilot plant in Somerville, Sublime has reduced emissions by 90% compared to traditional cement, according to Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Leah Ellis. Sublime will start delivering on its deal with Microsoft when its first 30,000-ton commercial plant is operational. It's slated to be completed in 2027. Cement is heavy, and transporting it over long distances doesn't make sense economically, Ellis said. The deal allows Microsoft to support the scale-up of Sublime's technology even if it doesn't have a construction project near the startup's plant, she added. Do environmental attribute certificates work? In the past, some of these certificates have supported renewable projects that would have been developed anyway, meaning they didn't help bring additional wind and solar online as promised, studies show. Microsoft has said it plans to phase out its use of unbundled renewable energy certificates in future years. If deals like the one the company signed with Sublime proliferate, the clean cement industry will need to prove that the certificates it is offering are verifiable and avoid carbon emissions that manufacturers would have generated otherwise, according to a 2024 report on structuring demand for lower-carbon materials co-published by RMI and Microsoft. That includes ensuring that the products' environmental benefits aren't double-counted, or claimed by multiple entities as a reduction on their emissions ledger. 'Checks must be in place along the way to increase confidence that every purchase of a certificate will deliver its expected outcome,' the report's authors wrote. For this deal with Microsoft, other customers who buy Sublime's cement won't be able to lay claim to its environmental benefits, Ellis said.
Bloomberg
20-05-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Microsoft-Backed Builder.ai to Enter Insolvency Proceedings
the artificial intelligence startup backed by Microsoft Corp. and the Qatar Investment Authority, will go into insolvency proceedings and appoint an administrator to manage the company's affairs, it said in a statement Tuesday. The London-based company, which has raised more than $450 million, lowered the sales figures it provided to investors and hired auditors to examine its last two years of accounts, Bloomberg reported in March.
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Business Standard
19-05-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Nvidia CEO Huang unveils new tech to keep global AI expansion going
Nvidia Corp. unveiled the latest raft of technologies aimed at sustaining the boom in demand for AI computing — and ensuring that its products stay at the center of the action. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang on Monday kicked off Computex in Taiwan, Asia's biggest electronics forum, touting new products and cementing ties with a region vital to the tech supply chain. His company's shares are riding a fresh rally following a dealmaking trip to the Middle East as part of a trade delegation led by President Donald Trump. Now back in his native Taiwan, Huang introduced updates to the ecosystem around Nvidia's accelerator chips, which are key to developing and running AI software and services. The central goal is to broaden the reach of Nvidia products and eliminate barriers to AI adoption by more industries and countries. 'When new markets have to be created, they have to be created starting here, at the center of the computer ecosystem,' Huang said about the island. Huang opened with an update on timing for Nvidia's next-generation GB300 systems for artificial intelligence workloads, which he said are coming in the third quarter of this year. They'll mark an upgrade on the current top-of-the-line Grace Blackwell AI systems, which are now being installed by major cloud service providers. The chipmaker is offering a new version of complete computers that it provides to data center owners. NVLink Fusion products will allow customers the option to either use their own central processor units with Nvidia's AI chips or use Nvidia's CPUs with another provider's AI accelerators. To date, Nvidia has only offered such systems built with its own components. This opening-up of its designs — which include crucial connectivity components that ensure a high-speed link between processors and accelerators — gives Nvidia's data center customers more flexibility and allows a measure of competition while still keeping Nvidia technology at the center. Major customers such as Microsoft Corp. and Inc. are trying to design their own processors and accelerators, and that risks making Nvidia less essential to data centers. MediaTek Inc., Marvell Technology Inc. and Alchip Technologies Ltd. will create custom AI chips that work with Nvidia processor-based gear, Huang said. Qualcomm Inc. and Fujitsu Ltd. plan to make custom processors that will work with Nvidia accelerators in the computers.
