Microsoft and ArcelorMittal back MIT spinout trying to green the $1.6 trillion steel industry
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.
That’s why massive global businesses, including international steel giant ArcelorMittal and tech stalwart Microsoft, are investing in Boston Metal, a company that spun out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and developed a new way of making clean steel.
“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.
In 2017, Carneiro joined the company as a CEO. He is a veteran of 40 years career in the steel industry, mostly at Brazilian metals giant CBMM. In 2018, Boston Metal raised its first round of funding, $20 million, in a round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the climate investing firm founded by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
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.”
Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.
Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.
As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.
Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.
Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.
This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.
Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.
The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.
Technology
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.
Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.
Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.
The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.
Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.
The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.
Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.
Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.
WATCH: Nvidia hits $4 trillion in market cap milestone despite curbs on chip exports
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