There are many potential ways to keep carbon dioxide out of the air. With the help of the volunteer-led OpenAir network, you could even make your own device to pull a few grams of CO2 from the air in your house each day.

But, but, but...One big question is which carbon-capture methods will be able to scale rapidly this decade.

• As the IPCC report released last week reminds us, we need to not only eliminate new emissions, but also remove billions of metric tons of CO2 per year in order to meet climate goals.

The bipartisan infrastructure law provides more than $11 billion to support the growth of carbon-capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technology. Most of that funding will be invested in two specific methods: One aimed at mitigating emissions from heavy industry, and another that can pull CO2 out of the air.

Click here to read our breakdown of the difference between these two types of carbon-capture tech, and read on for an excerpt.

Decarbonization definitions

Point-source carbon capture aims to stop the carbon-dioxide emissions produced by power plants or industrial operations from entering the atmosphere.

• The infrastructure law passed last year includes $3.5 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects at power plants and industrial facilities over the next five years.

Point-source capture is a way to keep industrial processes from adding new carbon emissions, but it doesn’t remove the CO2 that’s already in the atmosphere.

“That is basically emissions avoidance rather than carbon removal,” Peter Minor, director of science and innovation at climate-focused nonprofit Carbon180, told Emerging Tech Brew. “That prevents more emissions from going into the atmosphere, but doesn’t actually solve this problem of, ‘how do we stop the climate change that’s already built in?’”

Carbon removal is the goal of direct air capture (DAC). This technology pulls CO2 already present in the atmosphere out of the air, and the infrastructure law includes $3.5 billion to build four DAC hubs in the US.

Big picture: Both point-source capture and DAC are very expensive today, and the former is controversial among climate groups. Even still, experts say DAC will also play an important role in meeting climate goals and keeping warming to a minimum.

Click here to read the full primer.—GD

Last Thursday, a buzzy new supercomputer startup debuted—with $105 million in Series A funding.

The startup’s ethos? Software has come a long way, but the hardware to support everything AI can do doesn’t exist yet. And Luminous Computing believes it has the solution: building the world’s most powerful supercomputer.

• Luminous’s investors include Bill Gates and Gigafund, the VC firm founded by PayPal and Founders Fund alumni.

Behind the hype: Luminous’s business plan centers on an alternative approach to chipmaking: photonic chips. It posits that the efficiency of light—which moves faster and generates less heat than electricity, which is typically what processors use to send signals—could lead to higher performance.

In July, we spoke with Nick Harris, co-founder and CEO of a Luminous competitor called Lightmatter, who told us that “the major challenge—it’s really about energy density. Essentially, computer chips today are way too hot.”

• He added that, using light, “we’re able to get around this fundamental technology challenge, this energy problem. And since light defines the speed limit in our universe, it’s the fastest thing out there.”
• Other competitors include Celestial AI and Intel.

Luminous also has rivals on the “world’s most powerful AI supercomputer” front. Meta is working on one that it claims will become the fastest of its kind in the world. The Meta system’s processing power is currently on par with the world’s fifth-fastest supercomputer.

Looking ahead, Luminous plans to use its newfound millions to double its engineering team, invest in the startup’s chips and software products, and scale up for the commercial market.

Big picture: Luminous wants to make it “much easier to build huge AI models,” Marcus Gomez, CEO and cofounder, said in the company’s release. As loyal readers of this newsletter may know, ever-faster and ever-larger AI models are an increasingly controversial debate in the field right now, for their potential to learn and spread patterns of bias.

Click here to read on-site.—HF

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

I am head of the marketing department for a company that has developed an end-to-end platform that can record, digitize, and process neural signals to enable the restoration of function to those who suffer from paralysis, deafness, and [impaired] sight. Our “brain-computer interface” (BCI) technology has been implanted in 29 humans chronically and nearly 100 sub-chronically since 2004. Our BCI technology was the first available for human research.

What’s your favorite emerging tech project you’ve worked on?

It’s confidential, but our current system records up to 512 channels.

Every end of an electrode is a channel, so it’s a 10-by-10 grid, and off those grids is a tiny pinpoint spike. So that gets implanted into the brain, and the end of the spike allows you to talk to individual neurons—we consider that one channel. The more channels you have, the more neural signals you can listen to, and the more detail you can get from that, translating what those signals mean.

Consider “Channel Count,” like a bit rate. The higher the bit rate, the more information can be transferred. The higher channel count the more neurons we can listen to and record, providing more neural signals to interpret. We have plans over the next three to five years to go from 10,000 channels to 100,000 channels. 

What’s the best piece of tech-related media you’ve read/watched/listened to?

I Am Human, produced by Taryn Southern. It’s a documentary that features three people who are using a BCI-type technology to improve their way of life. Blackrock’s technology is used on one of the patients, who has a spinal cord injury.

Stat: Ithaca, New York, wants to decarbonize all 6,000 of its buildings by 2030—the most aggressive goal of its kind among US cities.

Quote: “Any time you do anything at scale, you start to get resistance…It’s a sign of maturity in solar that, when people want to scale, you get resistance.”—Michael Webber, professor of energy at University of Texas at Austin, to NBC News

Read: You’ve heard of quantum computers, but what about quantum sensors?

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For VR x music: Here’s a TikTok of an artist messing around in Virtuoso, a “VR musical sandbox.”

For a SPAC-tastic chart: A reminder that projections can be wildly different from reality.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Ithaca wants to decarbonize all of its buildings by 2030—here’s how it will work
• A small-scale satellite-launching contest shows just how accessible space has become
• The DOE just went on a cleantech spending spree