Pulling carbon dioxide - and fresh water - out of thin air, one modular plant at a time.
The number in the name is a target. Before the Industrial Revolution, the atmosphere held about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide. It now holds more than 425, and climbing. 280 Earth, a climate-tech company headquartered in Palo Alto and operating on the banks of the Columbia River in The Dalles, Oregon, took that pre-industrial figure as both its name and its mission.
The company builds and runs Direct Air Capture, or DAC, systems - machines that pull CO2 permanently out of the ambient air rather than from a smokestack. The technology was developed over roughly four years inside X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory, the same lab that produced Waymo and Wing. In 2022 the project spun out as an independent company.
What distinguishes 280 Earth is less a single breakthrough material and more a design philosophy. Its process uses a proprietary sorbent moving through a gravity-fed, dual-chamber system - continuously cycling material between capturing CO2 and releasing it - rather than switching a single chamber on and off. It runs on low-grade industrial waste heat or clean electricity, and it is assembled largely from commercially available, off-the-shelf equipment.
That last point matters more than it sounds. The unsolved problem in carbon removal is not whether it can be done, but whether it can be done at a price and pace that matter. Exotic hardware is hard to manufacture a hundred times over. Commodity parts are not. 280 Earth designed for the hundredth plant from the start.
"Our first DAC project deploys a very energy efficient process to capture CO2 directly from the air."
280 Earth's continuous process captures both CO2 and water vapor from the air. The CO2 is concentrated and liquefied for permanent sequestration or industrial use; the water can be put to work - notably, as supplemental cooling when a plant sits next to a data center.
Ambient air passes over a long-lasting proprietary sorbent that grabs CO2 and moisture.
Waste heat or clean power gently releases the captured CO2 - a low-temperature step that keeps energy use down.
CO2 is purified and liquefied for permanent sequestration or industrial use; water is recovered.
Off-the-shelf, modular units repeat the cycle - from 500-ton phases toward 5,000-ton blocks.
280 Earth is a B2B business. It sells permanent, durable carbon removal to corporations that want to counter emissions they cannot yet eliminate. Its largest commitment to date runs through Frontier, the advance market program: a roughly $40 million offtake agreement for 61,571 tons of CO2 removal between 2024 and 2030.
Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta and McKinsey Sustainability anchor the deal, alongside Autodesk, H&M Group, JPMorgan Chase, Workday, Canva, Wise, Zendesk and more.
Factories and plants with spare low-grade heat can power a co-located DAC unit, turning a waste stream into carbon removal.
Paired with a data center, the water 280 Earth captures can provide cooling - up to ~200,000 tons of water a year per 60-MW facility.
Direct air capture research and lab-scale prototyping start inside X, The Moonshot Factory.
After roughly four years of development, the project becomes an independent company.
Phase I in The Dalles begins operating, capturing about 500 tons of CO2 per year on hydropower.
Round led by Builders VC, with Gideon Yu and Alphabet among the backers.
Plans advance toward 5,000-ton modules; Anand Saxena is listed as CEO & CTO.
"280 Earth's technology will be a key contributor to the portfolio of solutions necessary to reduce CO2 in our atmosphere."
It builds and operates direct air capture plants that permanently remove CO2 - and capture fresh water - from ambient air, then sells the durable carbon removal to corporate buyers.
280 refers to 280 parts per million, the atmospheric CO2 concentration before the Industrial Revolution. Today's level is above 425 ppm, and the company aims to help move it back down.
Its first plant is in The Dalles, Oregon. Phase I captures about 500 tons of CO2 per year, and the site is designed to scale beyond 20,000 tons per year at full buildout.
It uses a continuous, low-temperature process that runs on industrial waste heat or clean power, co-produces water, and is built from off-the-shelf modular equipment to lower cost and speed up scaling.
The technology was developed at Alphabet's X, and the company closed a $50M Series B in 2024 led by Builders VC, with investors including Gideon Yu and Alphabet. Frontier buyers signed a ~$40M carbon-removal offtake agreement.