Stripe, Shopify, H&M spend $7 million on carbon removal from a dozen new companies
Airhive is one of the dozen companies Frontier has facilitated carbon removal purchases from on behalf of Stripe, Shopify and H&M. Airhive is developing a geochemical direct air capture system.
Photo courtesy Airhive.
Stripe, Shopify and H&M Group announced Thursday they are spending $7 million on carbon removal from a dozen new startups.
The deal was facilitated by Frontier, a public benefit company owned by payment processing company Stripe, which launched in April 2022 to accelerate the development of carbon removal technologies and make sure there is future demand to support the growth of the nascent industry.
Stripe, Shopify and H&M are three of the member companies of Frontier, and together, they spent $7 million on carbon removal purchases from 12 companies: Airhive, Alkali Earth, Banyu Carbon, Carbon Atlantis, CarbonBlue, CarbonRun, EDAC Labs, Holocene, Mati, Planetary Technologies, Spiritus Technologies and Vaulted Deep.
The techniques for removing carbon dioxide vary significantly: Alkali Earth applies alkaline byproducts from industrial processes to gravel on roads which acts as a carbon sink. CarbonBlue uses calcium to mineralize and remove dissolved carbon dioxide in freshwater or ocean water. Mati applies silicate rock powder to agricultural fields, where it reacts with water and carbon dioxide to produce dissolved carbon, and is starting to test its product on the rice paddy farms in India — and the list goes on.
Frontier facilitates carbon removal purchases for its member companies via multiple pathways, including pre-purchase agreements and offtake agreements. Pre-purchase agreements are generally smaller purchases where payment is made upfront and is not conditional on delivery, and the goal is to support early stage carbon removal companies.
The $7 million announced Thursday are pre-purchase agreements, and the amount of carbon expected to be removed ranges from 58 tons to 1,666 tons, depending on the startup.
Mati is one of the dozen companies Frontier has facilitated carbon removal purchases from on behalf of Stripe, Shopify and H&M. Mati applies silicate rock powders to agricultural fields where it reacts with water and carbon dioxide to produce dissolved carbon and is starting to test its product on the rice paddy farms in India.
Photo courtesy Mati
Offtake agreements are significantly larger purchases intended for later-stage companies and get paid out as the tons of carbon are removed and sequestered.
So far, Frontier has made one $53 million offtake agreement announcement with Charm Industrials to remove 112,000 tons of CO2 between 2024 and 2030. Charm sequesters carbon dioxide underground by gathering excess organic material — like corn stover — and converting that into a bio-oil, which it then pumps into abandoned oil and gas wells.
Offtake agreements with larger carbon removal companies will comprise most of the $1 billion-plus that Frontier has secured from its member companies, which also include Alphabet, Autodesk, JPMorgan Chase, McKinsey, Meta and Workday. Participation in the pre-purchase program for member companies is optional, but all Frontier members participate in the offtake purchases.
“But we still have the pre-purchase program to support the early stage companies, and really to make sure that we can get to the portfolio of gigaton scale removal that we need eventually, by starting today,” Joanna Klitzke, Frontier’s procurement and ecosystem strategy lead, told CNBC on Tuesday.
CarbonBlue is one of the dozen companies Frontier has facilitated carbon removal purchases from on behalf of Stripe, Shopify and H&M. CarbonBlue uses calcium to mineralize and remove dissolved carbon dioxide in freshwater or ocean water.
Photo courtesy CarbonBlue.
In addition to the pre-purchase agreements, Stripe is announcing on Thursday it has provided $250,000 in a research and development grant to both carbon removal startups, Carboniferous and Rewind, for a total of $500,000. Also, Stripe has provided $100,000 in funding to carbon removal start-ups Arbon and Vycarb, for a total of $200,000, in a partnership with the climate tech accelerator, Activate.
All of these efforts today are capturing minuscule amounts of carbon emissions compared with the quantity of emissions being released — humanity emitted 36.8 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2022 just to produce energy, according to the IEA. But the thought behind Frontier is that these techniques will be tested and built out over time.
And the carbon removal industry will need to grow dramatically in order for humanity to achieve its climate goals, according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Carbon dioxide removal cannot be a “substitute for immediate and deep emissions reductions, but it is part of all modelled scenarios that limit global warming to 2 degrees (Celsius) or lower by 2100,” the IPCC says.
Stripe Climate began carbon removal purchases in 2020 and Frontier launched a couple years later. Since then, there has been an increase in both the quantity and quality of applications, Klitzke told CNBC.
Carboniferous is one of two companies that stripe is announced Thursday that it has provided $250,000 in a research and development grant to. Carboniferous is developing a process to sink leftover surgar cane fiber and corn stover into the deep oxygenless parts of the Gulf of Mexico.
Photo courtesy Carboniferous
“In my mind, that’s a really encouraging sign that the field is growing and maturing,” Klitzke told CNBC. Frontier is seeing new approaches to carbon removal coming from a more diverse range of geographies in the applicant pool, which is also encouraging, Klitzke said.
For Frontier, the idea of carbon removal is not isolated from a primary climate goal of “really, really deep, deep emission reductions and fossil fuel phase out,” Klitzke told CNBC. “The role of carbon removal is fully to address legacy emissions and is not to be an offset or an excuse for the fossil industry.”
Alibaba‘s Hong Kong-listed shares surged on Wednesday to reach their highest point since 2021 after the company said it will invest more in artificial intelligence and rolled out new AI products and updates.
Shares of the company jumped over 6%, while its total gains year to date rose above 107%.
The tech giant plans to increase spending on AI models and infrastructure development, on top of the 380 billion yuan ($53 billion) over three years it announced in February, Chief Executive Officer Eddie Wu said Wednesday at Alibaba Cloud’s annual flagship technology conference.
“We are vigorously advancing a three-year, 380 billion [yuan] AI infrastructure initiative with plans to sustain and further increase our investment according to our strategic vision in anticipation of the [artificial superintelligence] era,” Wu said.
Alibaba shares surge after CEO unveils plans to boost AI spending
So-called ‘artificial superintelligence’ refers to AI that would hypothetically surpass the power and intelligence of the human brain, with the hypothetical benchmark becoming a growing focus of major AI companies.
Alibaba also officially unveiled the latest version of its Qwen large language models — the Qwen3-Max — on Wednesday, along with a series of other updates to its suite of AI product offerings.
Wu highlighted that Alibaba Cloud is strategically positioned as a “full-stack AI service provider,” delivering the computing power required for training and deploying large AI models on the cloud through its own data centers.
“The cumulative investment in global AI in the next five years will exceed $4 trillion, and this is the largest investment in computing power and research and development in history,” he added.
A person walks by a sign for Micron Technology headquarters in San Jose, California, on June 25, 2025.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Micron reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue on Tuesday as well as a robust forecast for the current quarter.
The stock rose in extended trading.
Here’s how the company did in comparison with the LSEG consensus:
- Earnings per share: $3.03, adjusted, vs. $2.86 expected
- Revenue: $11.32 billion vs. $11.22 billion expected
Micron said revenue in the current period, its fiscal first quarter, will be about $12.5 billion, versus the $11.94 billion average analyst estimate per LSEG.
The company said it had $3.2 billion, or $2.83 per share in net income, versus $887 million, or 79 cents in the year-ago period.
Micron shares have nearly doubled so far in 2025. The company makes memory and storage, which are important components for computers. Micron has been one of the winners of the artificial intelligence boom. That’s because high-end AI chips like those made by Nvidia require increasing amounts of high-tech memory called high-bandwidth memory, which Micron makes.
“As the only U.S.-based memory manufacturer, Micron is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the AI opportunity ahead,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in a statement.
Overall company revenue rose 46% on a year-over-year basis during the quarter.
Micron’s largest unit, which sells memory for cloud providers, reported $4.54 billion in sales during the quarter, more than tripling on a year-over-year basis.
However, the company’s core data center business unit saw sales decline 22% on an annual basis to $1.57 billion in revenue.
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