Google, Anthropic, and Salesforce are putting more money behind a very unglamorous idea with huge ambitions: paying in advance for future carbon removal. Their coalition, Frontier, has added a $915 million Advanced Market Commitment, taking total purchase commitments to $1.8 billion and trying to solve the industry’s oldest headache – who buys the stuff before it exists at scale?
The answer, at least for now, is corporate pre-orders. Frontier’s model gives startups a predictable revenue stream for technologies that can remove CO2 from the air, which is exactly what early-stage climate hardware usually lacks. That matters because even promising systems tend to stall when pilots are done and factories are still a spreadsheet fantasy.
How Frontier’s advance purchase model works
Frontier is not betting on a single winner. It is spreading its commitments across several approaches, from mineralisation and ocean alkalinity enhancement to direct air capture and carbon storage in biomass. That portfolio approach is sensible; no one technology is likely to pull billions of tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere on its own, and the industry knows it.
- Total Frontier commitments: $1.8 billion
- New Advanced Market Commitment: $915 million
- Backers include Stripe, Google, Shopify, Anthropic, Salesforce, H&M, JPMorganChase, McKinsey Sustainability, Workday, and Autodesk
Why carbon removal still needs buyers first
The coalition says the technologies are already technically viable, but still economically boxed in. That is the classic clean-tech trap: engineering can get you to a pilot plant, but without guaranteed demand, financing the jump to industrial scale gets painfully expensive. Frontier is trying to turn demand itself into infrastructure.
It also quietly acknowledges a hard truth about the carbon-removal race. The market is not going to be built by one breakthrough headline or one subsidy program; it will need a boring mix of procurement, long-term contracts, and companies willing to sign up before the economics look tidy. In that sense, Frontier is less a climate club than a very well-funded waiting room.
The next test is scale, not proof
Frontier’s real challenge is whether advance purchases can push projects from prototype to repeatable production fast enough to matter. The coalition is effectively creating a private-sector version of a public procurement scheme, and if it works, other hard-tech sectors will copy the playbook. If it does not, the money still buys experiments – just not the atmospheric cleanup the backers are hoping for.