Dec 2 (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc ( AMZN ) plans to pilot

a new carbon-removal material for data centers, which are at

risk of worsening emissions from artificial intelligence systems

they power, a startup behind the deal said on Monday.

In a twist, AI itself, from the startup Orbital Materials,

is what designed the carbon-filtering substance, its Chief

Executive Jonathan Godwin said.

"It's like a sponge at the atomic level," Godwin told

Reuters. "Each cavity in that sponge has a specific size opening

that interacts well with CO2, that doesn't interact with other

things."

Potential cost-savings are partly the draw. The new material

adds up to an estimated 10% of the hourly charge to rent a GPU

chip for training powerful AI -- a fraction of carbon offsets'

price, Godwin said.

At the same time, data centers are requiring more energy to

sustain AI's development and more water to keep them cool. That

poses a challenge to companies like Amazon ( AMZN ), which has committed

to have net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

Its unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is the world's largest

cloud-computing provider by revenue. It is piloting the novel

material in one data center to start in 2025 as part of its

three-year partnership with Orbital, Godwin said. The agreement

also provides for Orbital to use AWS technology and to make its

open-source AI available to AWS customers.

Howard Gefen, general manager of AWS Energy & Utilities, in

a statement said the partnership would encourage sustainable

innovation. Godwin declined to state the financial terms.

Orbital, which has operations in Princeton, New Jersey and

London, set up a lab about a year ago to synthesize substances

that had been simulated by its AI, Godwin said. The startup aims

to work with AWS to test still-more AI-generated materials to

address water use and chip cooling in data centers.

Godwin co-founded the 20-person company, backed by Radical

Ventures and Nvidia's ( NVDA ) venture arm among others, after

helping lead materials science work for Alphabet's

DeepMind until 2022.