Google has signed its largest carbon-removal purchase to date, backing an unusually ambitious climate project that will use more than 200,000 hectares of rice farms in southern Brazil to tackle two different greenhouse-gas problems at once.
The agreement with climate company Terradot will pair changes to rice-field irrigation with enhanced rock weathering, a process that uses crushed volcanic rock to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Google says it will purchase 1 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent near-term climate impact from methane elimination by 2030, alongside 1 million metric tons of permanent carbon removal by 2040.
That combination is what makes the deal stand out. Rather than treating methane reduction and long-term carbon removal as separate projects, Google and Terradot are trying to make both happen on the same farmland.
How rice farms became part of Google’s climate strategy
Rice cultivation produces methane because paddies are commonly kept flooded. Terradot plans to help participating farmers use a technique known as Alternate Wetting and Drying, periodically draining the fields instead of keeping them continuously submerged.
The aim is to reduce methane emissions quickly. On the same fields, Terradot will spread naturally sourced crushed volcanic rock. As the material weathers, chemical reactions gradually pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in a more durable form.
Google describes the project as the first publicly announced effort at this scale to combine short-lived superpollutant elimination with permanent carbon removal inside a single agricultural system. Reuters reports that it is also the largest enhanced rock-weathering project announced to date.
Why this matters to the technology industry
This may look like an agriculture story, but its timing is inseparable from a much bigger challenge facing the technology sector: computing is becoming extraordinarily energy hungry.
The rapid buildout of AI infrastructure has pushed Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and other technology companies toward increasingly large data-centre investments. Those facilities require enormous amounts of electricity, while the companies behind them are simultaneously trying to meet climate commitments.
Reuters notes that Big Tech companies are under growing pressure to expand clean-energy and carbon-removal investments as emissions associated with AI-driven data centres rise. Google’s latest deal therefore sits alongside another emerging technology race: securing enough power for AI while finding credible ways to address the resulting environmental footprint.
It is an issue already visible around the world. Google recently announced a major AI-infrastructure investment in Finland tied to long-term nuclear power supply, while Australia is seeing proposals for multi-gigawatt AI data-centre campuses. The scale of modern computing is turning electricity, grids and emissions into technology-industry issues rather than background infrastructure concerns.
The project is designed to go beyond Brazil
The first deployment will focus on rice farms in Rio Grande do Sul, where climate, soil conditions and access to basalt make enhanced rock weathering attractive. Google says the approach could eventually be expanded across Brazil’s roughly 1.5 million hectares of rice cultivation and adapted for other rice-producing regions worldwide.
Terradot also expects to run pilots in multiple countries during 2026 before a broader commercial scale-up targeted for 2028.
There is still an important economic question. Google and Terradot have not disclosed the price of the new credits. Reuters reports that enhanced rock weathering remains above the roughly US$100-per-ton level many developers view as important for mass adoption, although Terradot says this project should be cheaper than earlier deals.
AI’s next constraint may not be the chip
For the past several years, the AI race has largely been discussed in terms of models, GPUs and computing performance. Increasingly, the limiting factors are becoming more physical: electricity generation, transmission capacity, cooling, land and the environmental cost of running vast amounts of computing infrastructure.
Google’s Brazil deal does not solve the emissions challenge created by expanding AI infrastructure, and carbon-removal projects remain debated as a climate strategy. Critics argue that removals should not become a substitute for cutting emissions directly. But the size of this agreement shows how seriously technology companies are beginning to treat the other side of the AI boom.
The next generation of AI may depend as much on energy and infrastructure as it does on better processors. The companies that want to build it are now having to confront both sides of that equation.
Sources: Google, Terradot and Reuters reporting published September 16, 2026.
Featured image: rice fields photographed by Ivan Bandura via Unsplash.
