To battle the effects of AI, one company is using, well, AI.

Catona Climate, a Marina del Rey-based carbon finance company, announced in August it had created a financing model that will directly embed carbon removal into artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Catona Climate sells carbon credits to large companies to help them achieve carbon-neutral or carbon-negative goals. Meta ordered 6.75 million metric tons of carbon removal credits via Catona Climate in July. Catona Climate also worked with Microsoft Corp. in February to remove 350,000 tons of carbon in Kenya through a partnership with Trees for the Future.

Catona Climate is targeting a growing problem for tech companies that have announced carbon neutrality goals but are now heavily pursuing AI, which uses so much energy that states are revising carefully crafted, decades-long environmental goals to keep coal plants around.

But Catona Climate is also using AI itself. The company is using bioacoustic information – sounds from birds and other fauna – to measure the effectiveness of its climate projects and is feeding that data into AI to better track progress.

“Our challenge over the coming years will be to harness the power of AI for good while mitigating as best we can its negative climate effects,” Catona Climate chief executive Tate Mill said in a statement.

Catona Climate’s history is one embroiled with controversy. It was once the carbon arm of Aspiration Partners, a climate-focused banking company that posited itself as “Wall Street greed’s worst nightmare.”

The company offered a debit card that would contribute to planting trees, and investment funds that excluded fossil fuel stocks. Aspiration Partners had a star-studded backing that included the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr. and Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer.

Just as Aspiration Partners was eyeing a $2 billion initial public offering, employees and partners worried the company was not accurately reporting revenue or following standard operating procedures, per Bloomberg. Now, the company has laid off the majority of its employees and faces a handful of lawsuits from partners over unpaid bills and a probe from the Department of Justice. 

Catona Climate did not respond to requests for comment.

But Catona Climate survived. The company scours the earth for carbon removal projects like reforestation, direct air capture (constructing hardware that would suck carbon from the sky) and adopting no-till agriculture to promote carbon in soil. It then translates those projects into carbon credits which companies can buy.

Several high-profile tech companies like Microsoft, Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. have announced goals to go carbon-neutral or carbon-negative by around 2030.

The cost of a single carbon credit can vary, and a company could theoretically purchase cheap carbon credits that don’t go toward meaningful projects and claim they have reached net-zero carbon emissions.

“We need to go beyond forward offtake agreements and – in parallel to innovating around how we accelerate global decarbonization efforts – deploy more creative, accessible, automated climate solutions that embed carbon removal upstream into the fastest-growing, hardest-to-abate supply chains and technologies,” Mill said. “Including AI.”