Dive Brief:
- Frontier Climate, a carbon removal purchasing group backed by Stripe, Google, Shopify and others, announced last week that Anthropic had joined the buyers group, and the group would invest $915 million in leading carbon removal companies, according to a June 17 release.
- The new funding brings Frontier’s collective commitment to $1.8 billion, the release said. Frontier will use the new financing to concentrate its purchasing of carbon dioxide removal on the supply side and make sure any deals help lead to long-term demand.
- Anthropic, the company behind artificial intelligence platform Claude, joins the carbon removal purchasing group the same month it submitted a filing for its future initial public offering to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Anthropic’s confidential filing does not list the number of shares it plans to offer or pricing.
Dive Insight:
Frontier — whose members also include JPMorgan Chase, H&M and Salesforce, among others — launched in 2022 as an advance market commitment to buy $1 billion in carbon removals by 2030. The group said it is looking to move into a growth phase of its commitment, and that corporate buyers will help bridge the gap to gigaton-scale carbon removal by “providing the reliable revenue companies need today to get their technologies to commercial scale.”
Frontier’s portfolio includes over 1.8 million tons of contracted carbon removals across 53 projects, with $698 million contracted over those projects. Across those projects, the group said it has contracted to remove 463,700 tons of carbon dioxide for $169.8 million since June 2025.
Tim Thomson, president and CFO of Charm Industrial, said Charm is “thrilled” to see Anthropic join Frontier’s carbon removal purchasing group. Frontier Climate has contracted 112,003 tons of biomass carbon removal and storage from Charm Industrial for $53 million, according to Frontier’s portfolio.
“AI has the potential for incredible economic growth and scientific breakthroughs, but comes at the cost of enormous power requirements,” Thomson said in emailed comments to ESG Dive Monday. “Carbon removal done right can help mitigate those costs: not just the CO2 but also the [fine, inhalable particulate matter and nitrogen oxide] emitted in the process.”
With the new funding, Frontier will focus its supply side efforts on purchasing removals from “a narrower portfolio of companies where [Frontier buyers] have high conviction the technology has gigaton-scale potential.” Frontier demand-side efforts will work to ensure that each deal has “a clear line of sight to robust, long-term demand, be it compliance markets, industrial regulation, or direct government procurement.”
Since Frontier’s launch, the group has done due diligence on over 500 carbon removal companies, and its buyers signed the first commercial offtake deals for CDR pathways including enhanced rock weathering, biomass injection and waste-to-energy with carbon capture, according to last week’s release.
“We've proven that carbon removal technology can work,” Frontier said in the June 17 release. “The most important questions for each pathway are now how big it can get, how cheap it can get, and whether it can be deployed responsibly at scale.”
Frontier predicted that surface mineralization, ocean alkalinity enhancement, biomass removal and storage, enhanced rock weathering and direct air capture are carbon removal pathways that have the potential to reach annual gigaton scale at between $60 and $300 per ton.
