Removing molten iron from a pilot scale facility at the Boston Metal facilities in Woburn, Mass.
Photo courtesy Boston Metal
The $1.6 trillion steel industry is the backbone of the modern world. It’s also a significant contributor to global warming, representing between 7% and 9% of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to the World Steel Association.
“There is no economy, there is no infrastructure without steel,” Boston Metal CEO Tadeu Carneiro told CNBC in a video call on Wednesday. So when it comes to decarbonizing industry to fight climate change, “it’s a big piece of the puzzle. I don’t think this is obvious to everybody,” Carneiro said.
In 2013, MIT professors Donald Sadoway and Antoine Allanore published a paper in the journal Nature with lab results proving that it is possible to generate steel without releasing carbon dioxide emissions. The same year they launched a company, Boston Electrometallurgical Corp., to scale and commercialize that technology.
Gates has for years emphasized the need to think about decarbonizing the manufacturing sector. Transportation gets a whole lot of attention but is responsible for only 16% of global emissions, where manufacturing generates 31%, according to Gates’ book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.”
“Whenever I hear an idea for what we can do to keep global warming in check — whether it’s over a conference table or a cheeseburger — I always ask this question: ‘What’s your plan for steel?'” Gates wrote on his own blog in 2019.
On Friday, Boston Metal announced it has raised $120 million Series C round, led by multinational steel giant ArcelorMittal, with funding from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund as well.
With the funding, Boston Metal will ramp up production of green steel at its pilot facility on Woburn, Massachusetts, and support the construction of its Brazilian subsidiary, Boston Metal do Brasil, where the company will manufacture various metals. It plans to begin construction of a demonstration steel plant in 2024 and a commercial sized plant in 2026, Carneiro told CNBC.
The Boston Metal team.
Photo courtesy Boston Metal
The cost of carbon for ArcelorMittal
For ArcelorMittal, making steel without greenhouse gas emissions is not only a responsibility, but also a business necessity according to Irina Gorbounova, a vice president and the Head of XCarb Innovation Fund at ArcelorMittal.
“Our customers are asking for it, our investors expect us to transition and our employees — and our future workforce — want to work for a company that is part of the solution and not part of the world’s climate problem,” Gorbounova told CNBC.
“Increasingly, we are also seeing a cost of carbon,” Gorbounova told CNBC. In Europe, the Emissions Trading System, or ETS, already puts a price on carbon emissions, Gorbounova told CNBC.
“The EU has been at the forefront of climate policy, but it’s reasonable to expect other regions to follow. So, there is a business case for us to decarbonize as well,” Gorbounova told CNBC. “Zero or near-zero carbon emissions steel will become a reality. The only question is how quickly we can make that journey happen. If steel companies don’t decarbonize, they will not stand the test of time.”
Ironically, steel is a primary component ingredient in many of the technologies being constructed to decarbonize, such as wind toward and electric vehicles, Gorbounova said.
Microsoft does not build cars or make steel, but it is trying to meet its own aggressive climate goals, which include being carbon negative by 2030 and removing all of the company’s historic carbon emissions since the company was founded in 1975.
Boston Metal CEO Tadeu Carneiro worked in the steel industry for decades before coming on to lead the MIT spin out.
Photo courtesy Boston Metal
How does Boston Metal do it?
Traditionally, the first step in steel production is to combine iron ore or iron oxide, which is mined out of the ground, with coal in a very hot blast furnace. That process generates significant CO2 emissions.
Scrap recycling is also a key part of the global industry, accounting for 30% of steel production (70%in the United States), and has a “much smaller” carbon footprint, Carneiro said.
Boston Metal’s technology, Molten Oxide Electrolysis, passes electricity through the iron oxide mixed with what Carneiro calls a “soup of other oxides” to make iron and oxygen. Oxides are chemical compounds that contain at least one oxygen atom, and Boston’s process includes common oxides like alumina, silica, calcium and magnesium.
“There’s no carbon involved” in the process of making the iron from this method, Carneiro said.
That said, heating this soup to the required 1,600 degrees Celsius requires significant electrical energy — making one million tons of steel per year will require 500 megawatts of baseload clean electricity, or about half the electricity necessary to power a midsize city. “The availability of electricity will dictate how fast the process will be implemented,” Carneiro said.
The electricity has to be clean as well, or it defeats the entire purpose.
“We believe in the future, we will have abundant and reliable and green and cheap electricity in order to use this process and manufacture green steel,” Carniero said.
There are other processes being developed to make clean steel with hydrogen, but they require very pure iron oxide, and only about 4% of the iron ore that is commercialized is suitable, Carniero said.
Boston Metal will eventually license its technology to steel companies, not be a steel manufacturer itself.
“Every steelmaking company is in contact with us to understand our progress and when we will become commercial,” Carneiro told CNBC. “They all making pledges to be carbon-neutral by 2050. And they don’t really have a solution right now. So, they really need a solution for large scale, and our technology is the only one that can scale up to this billions of tons of capacity.”
The X logo appears on a phone, and the xAI logo is displayed on a laptop in Krakow, Poland, on April 1, 2025. (Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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Elon Musk‘s xAI Holdings is in discussions with investors to raise about $20 billion, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The funding would value the company at over $120 billion, according to the report.
Musk was looking to assign “proper value” to xAI, sources told CNBC’s David Faber earlier this month. The remarks were made during a call with xAI investors, sources familiar with the matter told Faber. The Tesla CEO at that time didn’t explicitly mention any upcoming funding round, but the sources suggested xAI was preparing for a substantial capital raise in the near future.
The funding amount could be more than $20 billion as the exact figure had not been decided, the Bloomberg report added.
Artificial intelligence startup xAI didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment outside of U.S. business hours.
The AI firm last month acquired X in an all-stock deal that valued xAI at $80 billion and the social media platform at $33 billion.
“xAI and X’s futures are intertwined. Today, we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent,” Musk said on X, announcing the deal. “This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai during the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 10, 2023.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Alphabet‘s stock gained 3% Friday after signaling strong growth in its search and advertising businesses amid a competitive artificial intelligence environment and uncertain macro backdrop.
“GOOGL‘s pace of GenAI product roll-out is accelerating with multiple encouraging signals,” wrote Morgan Stanley‘s Brian Nowak. “Macro uncertainty still exists but we remain [overweight] given GOOGL’s still strong relative position and improving pace of GenAI enabled product roll-out.”
The search giant posted earnings of $2.81 per share on $90.23 billion in revenues. That topped the $89.12 billion in sales and $2.01 in EPS expected by LSEG analysts. Revenues grew 12% year-over-year and ahead of the 10% anticipated by Wall Street.
Net income rose 46% to $34.54 billion, or $2.81 per share. That’s up from $23.66 billion, or $1.89 per share, in the year-ago period. Alphabet said the figure included $8 billion in unrealized gains on its nonmarketable equity securities connected to its investment in a private company.
Adjusted earnings, excluding that gain, were $2.27 per share, according to LSEG, and topped analyst expectations.
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Alphabet shares have pulled back about 16% this year as it battles volatility spurred by mounting trade war fears and worries that President Donald Trump‘s tariffs could crush the global economy. That would make it more difficult for Alphabet to potentially acquire infrastructure for data centers powering AI models as it faces off against competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic to develop largely language models.
During Thursday’s call with investors, Alphabet suggested that it’s too soon to tally the total impact of tariffs. However, Google’s business chief Philipp Schindler said that ending the de minimis trade exemption in May, which created a loophole benefitting many Chinese e-commerce retailers, could create a “slight headwind” for the company’s ads business, specifically in the Asia-Pacific region. The loophole allows shipments under $800 to come into the U.S. duty-free.
Despite this backdrop, Alphabet showed steady growth in its advertising and search business, reporting $66.89 billion in revenues for its advertising unit. That reflected 8.5% growth from the year-ago period. The company reported $8.93 billion in advertising revenue for its YouTube business, shy of an $8.97 billion estimate from StreetAccount.
Alphabet’s “Search and other” unit rose 9.8% to $50.7 billion, up from $46.16 billion last year. The company said that its AI Overviews tool used in its Google search results page has accumulated 1.5 billion monthly users from a billion in October.
Bank of America analyst Justin Post said that Wall Street is underestimating the upside potential and “monetization ramp” from this tool and cloud demand fueled by AI.
“The strong 1Q search performance, along with constructive comments on Gemini [large language model] performance and [AI Overviews] adoption could help alleviate some investor concerns on AI competition,” Post wrote in a note.
An Amazon employee works to fulfill same-day orders during Cyber Monday, one of the company’s busiest days at an Amazon fulfillment center on December 2, 2024 in Orlando, Florida.
Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo | Getty Images
For 10 years, Aaron Cordovez has been selling kitchen appliances on Amazon. Now he’s in a bind, because most of his products are manufactured in China.
Cordovez, co-founder of Zulay Kitchen, said his company is moving “as fast as we can” to move production to India, Mexico and other markets, where tariffs are increasing under President Donald Trump, but are mild compared with the levies imposed on goods from China. That process will likely take at least a year or two to complete, he said.
“We’re making our inventory last as long as we can,” Cordovez said in an email.
Zulay is alsotemporarily raising the price of some of its milk frothers, smores roasting sticks and other products. The company’s popular kitchen strainer now costs $12.99, up from $9.99 before Trump announced his sweeping tariff proposal earlier this month.
Amazon merchants are hiking prices for everything from diaper bags and refrigerator magnets to charm necklaces and other top-selling items as they confront higher import costs. E-commerce software company SmartScout tracked 930 products on Amazon that have seen increased prices since April 9, with an average jump of 29%.
The price hikes affect a range of categories, including clothing, jewelry, household items, office supplies, electronics and toys.
The trade war with China has threatened to upend sellers on Amazon’s third-party marketplace, which accounts for about 60% of the company’s online sales. Many merchants are based in China or rely on the world’s second-largest economy to source and assemble their products.
Sellers are now faced with the conundrum of raising prices or eating the extra costs associated with Trump’s new tariffs. It’s an existential threat for many sellers, who subsist on razor-thin margins and have, for the last several years, dealt with rising costs on Amazon tied to storage, fulfillment, shipping and advertising fees along with pricing pressure from increased competition.
CEO Andy Jassy told CNBC earlier this month that the company was “going to try and do everything we can” to keep prices low for shoppers, including renegotiating terms with some of its suppliers. But he acknowledged some third-party sellers will “need to pass that cost” of tariffs on to consumers.
Amazon’s stock price is down 15% so far this year, sliding along with the broader market. The company reports first-quarter earnings next week.
Goods imported from China now face import duties of 145%, though Trump said Wednesday his administration is “actively” talking with China about a potential deal to lower tariffs. Chinese officials on Thursday denied that trade talks are taking place.
About 25% of the price increases observed by SmartScout were initiated by sellers based in China, said Scott Needham, the company’s CEO. Last week, stainless steel jewelry maker Ursteel hiked prices on four of its products by $6.50, while apparel brand Chouyatou raised the price of some of its dresses by $2. Both businesses are based in China’s Zhejiang province.
Anker, a Chinese electronics brand and one of Amazon’s largest sellers, has raised prices on one-fifth of its products sold in the U.S., including a portable power bank, which went up to $135 from $110, SmartScout data shows.
Representatives from Anker, Ursteel and Chouyatou didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Zulay, headquartered in Florida, is one of many U.S.-based sellers raising prices. The company is also cutting costs. Cordovez said he’s been forced to lay off 19% of his workforce and slash online ad spending by 85%.
Desert Cactus, based in Illinois, is also taking action. Joe Stefani, the company’s president, has been looking to move production of some of his brand’s college-themed merchandise out of China and into Mexico, India and Vietnam. About half of Desert Cactus’ goods come from China, while the rest are made in the U.S., Stefani said.
An Amazon worker moves a cart filled with packages at an Amazon delivery station in Alpharetta, Georgia, on Nov. 28, 2022.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
One of the company’s top products is a customizable license plate frame that’s manufactured in China. At the start of Trump’s first term in 2016, Stefani’s company paid import and shipping fees of 4% on the license plates. That rate has since skyrocketed to 170%, he said.
“The tariffs can’t stay this high,” Stefani said. “There’s so many people that just aren’t going to make it.”
Stefani said he expects Desert Cactus will end up raising prices on some products, though he’s worried shoppers might be put off by sticker shock.
“Will someone be willing to pay $50 for a hat on Amazon?” Stefani said. “You know it’s going to be expensive at the ballpark, but on Amazon we don’t know.”
Dave Dama, co-founder of health and beauty business Pure Daily Care, said the price to manufacture one of his skin-care products in China jumped to $25 from $10. Most Amazon sellers will have no choice but to raise prices, he said.
“If you were selling something for $40 and making a $7 or $8 profit at the end of the day, with these tariffs, those days are gone,” Dama said. “You can’t do that anymore. It’s unsustainable.”
Pure Daily Care plans to stagger price increases over several weeks, and only on products “we absolutely need to,” to keep Amazon’s algorithms from ranking it lower in search results or losing the valuable buy box, he said. The buy box determines which listing pops up first when a shopper clicks on a particular product, and the one that gets purchased when they tap “Add to Cart.”
An Amazon spokesperson said the company’s pricing policies continue to apply.
“As always, sellers set their own prices, and we regularly monitor how we highlight great prices as Featured Offers to provide customers with low prices across a wide selection,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Dama said his company has enough inventory for some products to last up to six months, which it aims to “stretch as long as possible” in the hope that China and the U.S. can reach a trade deal. The company is also forgoing some sales promotions and discounts, while pausing spend on some display and video ads.
Regarding his inventory, Dama said, “We can try to stretch that seven, eight, nine months, which buys us a lot more time for this thing to work out, hopefully.”