Key Takeaways:

  • Frontier Climate, a carbon removal procurement group backed by Stripe, Google, Shopify, and others, announced last week that Anthropic has joined its buyer group and will invest $915 million in leading carbon removal companies. The news comes from an announcement released on June 17.
  • The announcement stated that the new funds bring Frontier's total collective commitments to $1.8 billion. Frontier will use this new financing to focus its carbon removal procurement on the supply side and ensure that related transactions help create long-term demand.
  • Anthropic, the developer of the AI platform Claude, joined the carbon removal procurement group in the same month it filed a confidential application with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a future initial public offering (IPO). Anthropic's confidential filing did not list the number of shares planned for offering or the pricing.

Deep Dive:

Frontier launched in 2022, initially as an advance market commitment to purchase $1 billion in carbon removal by 2030. Its members also include JPMorgan Chase, H&M, and Salesforce, among others. The group said it is seeking to enter a growth phase of commitments, where corporate buyers will help bridge the gap to gigaton-scale carbon removal by "providing the reliable revenue today's companies need to help their technologies reach commercial scale."

According to Frontier's portfolio data, the group has contracted for over 1.8 million tons of carbon removal across 53 projects, with total contracts worth $698 million. The group said that since June 2025, it has contracted to remove 463,700 tons of CO2 for $169.8 million.

Tim Thomson, president and CFO of Charm Industrial, said Charm is "thrilled" that Anthropic has joined Frontier's carbon removal procurement group. According to Frontier's portfolio, the group has contracted with Charm Industrial for 112,003 tons of biomass carbon removal and storage, with a contract value of $53 million.

"AI has the potential to bring amazing economic growth and scientific breakthroughs, but it comes at the cost of enormous electricity demand," Thomson said in emailed comments to ESG Dive on Monday. "Doing carbon removal well helps mitigate these costs: not just CO2, but also the (fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides) emitted along the way."

With the new funds, Frontier will focus its supply-side procurement on "a narrower set of companies whose technologies are highly believed by (Frontier buyers) to have gigaton-scale potential." Frontier's demand-side efforts will ensure that each transaction "clearly points to strong long-term demand, whether from compliance markets, industry regulation, or direct government procurement."

According to last week's announcement, since Frontier's launch, the group has conducted due diligence on more than 500 carbon removal companies, and its buyers have signed the first commercial offtake agreements for CDR pathways including enhanced rock weathering, biomass injection, and waste-to-energy carbon capture.

"We have proven that carbon removal technologies work," Frontier said in its June 17 announcement. "The most important question for every pathway now is: how big can it get, how cheap can it get, and can it be deployed at scale responsibly."

Frontier predicts that surface mineralization, ocean alkalinity enhancement, biomass removal and storage, enhanced rock weathering, and direct air capture are carbon removal pathways with the potential to reach gigaton-per-year scale, at costs ranging from $60 to $300 per ton.