Big Tech-backed coalition adds $915 million for carbon removal

A Big Tech-backed coalition for carbon removal has added $915 million to its commitment pool, pushing total pledges to $1.8 billion and bringing Anthropic into the fold as the first AI startup to join Frontier. The move deepens one of the clearest attempts yet to turn climate finance into guaranteed demand for technologies that are still expensive, early and far from proven at scale.

Frontier says it is an advance market commitment, a structure meant to buy permanent carbon removal by 2040. Its founders, Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta and McKinsey Sustainability, launched the coalition in 2022 with $925 million in initial commitments, framing the effort as a way to de-risk early projects by promising future buyers for carbon credits before the market fully exists.

The new money will back several approaches rather than one silver bullet. Frontier has said the sector includes ocean alkalinity enhancement, biomass-based removal, enhanced rock weathering and direct air capture, all of which could eventually reach gigaton scale, but each faces distinct cost, technical and verification hurdles. The coalition said it plans roughly 10 to 15 focused bets through long-term offtake contracts that can run as far out as 2040, a structure designed to create a reliable buyer base instead of waiting for corporate demand to emerge on its own.

That market-making role is central to Frontier’s pitch. Its launch materials said advance market commitments were first piloted for vaccines and that carbon removal is the first large-scale application of the model. Those same materials cited IPCC pathways consistent with 1.5 degrees Celsius warming limits and said fewer than 10,000 tons of permanent carbon had been removed through these technologies as of 2021, a reminder of how small the field remains relative to the climate math it is supposed to solve.

Frontier’s 2025 update suggests the market is still growing fast. The coalition said its portfolio companies broke ground on infrastructure capable of removing another 1.4 million tons of carbon a year, and buyers contracted $264 million more in carbon removal that year. Frontier said those deals included one of the world’s first commercial ocean alkalinity enhancement projects, an enhanced rock weathering project, an electrochemical direct air capture project and multiple biomass-based carbon removal agreements.

The coalition has also already helped channel earlier contracts, including $53 million with Charm Industrial, $48 million with CO280, $32.1 million with CREW and $80 million in new offtake agreements in December 2024 involving Google, H&M Group, Stripe and Salesforce. The latest expansion reads as both a climate signal and a market signal: serious money is still flowing into carbon removal, and the companies that helped build the digital economy are now helping define how its carbon cleanup market will be built.