Meta commits to buy cement, steel and plastics that don’t exist at scale yet

Meta has signed a set of multi-year purchase commitments covering cement, steel, trucking and recycled plastics, the company said on Thursday. The largest named volume is support for at least 180,000 tons of lower carbon cement from Sublime Systems.

Five suppliers, four material categories

According to Meta, the deals target the foundation materials that data centers consume and the freight that moves them. The company says the commitments give suppliers the revenue certainty to build production, and that early backing helps show the technology works so other buyers can follow.

Cement and concrete. Meta’s agreement with Sublime Systems supports at least 180,000 tons of production. It lets Sublime build its first commercial-scale facility and gives Meta priority access to Sublime Cement for its construction pipeline. Meta also signed with Fortera to support a new plant in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. Meta says both companies expect their early plants to add domestic capacity and American jobs. The deals follow earlier concrete projects with CarbonBuilt and CarbiCrete.

Iron and steel. Meta signed a multi-year agreement last year to support clean iron from Electra’s demonstration plant in Jefferson County, Colorado. The new step is steel: a deal with Sweden-based Stegra for near-zero-emission primary steel, made with a process that removes coal from iron reduction. Meta says structural steel reaches its data centers through global supply chains, so supporting a first-of-its-kind facility through its production ramp could validate technology for the wider industry.

Freight. Meta already had zero-emission trucking partnerships with NFI in Virginia and with Nevoya, working with the Center for Green Market Activation, in Texas. It is now extending the Nevoya work to a California and Arizona route along I-10. The charging stations are described as permanent and open access, so other commercial fleets can use them.

Plastics. A long-term purchase agreement with MacroCycle Technologies is helping finance the company’s first commercial plant in the Southeastern US. The plant aims to turn hard-to-recycle plastic waste into 5,000 tons per year of recycled PET. Across the planned and expanded US plants, Meta estimates the work supports hundreds of jobs in construction and manufacturing.

Paying for certificates, not necessarily taking delivery

The mechanism matters more than the tonnage. Meta says the agreements are structured to deliver Environmental Attribute Certificates (EACs). A supplier produces verified lower carbon material or service, Meta pays for the environmental benefit, and the material is used in the local market. Where possible, Meta adds, it will secure priority access to use the materials in its own future data centers as factories come online.

In practice, that means a share of the cement or steel in a given Meta data center may not be the lower carbon product, even though Meta funds that product’s existence. The announcement does not say how much of each deal is certificates and how much is physical supply, and it gives no contract values, delivery dates or emissions reductions.

A small lever on a very large footprint

Meta’s own sustainability site puts the scale of the problem in numbers. For 2024 it lists Scope 3 emissions, which cover the supply chain, at about 8.15 million metric tons of CO2e, roughly 99% of its total, against about 47,000 tons for Scope 1 and 1,358 tons for Scope 2 (Meta sustainability data). The materials in this announcement sit in that Scope 3 bucket. Meta’s interim target is to keep Scope 3 emissions from exceeding its 2021 baseline by the end of 2031, a goal of holding steady rather than cutting, at a time when its AI buildout is growing.

The deals also follow a pattern set by peers. Microsoft agreed in May 2025 to buy up to 622,500 metric tons of Sublime’s cement over several years, according to ESG Today. Meta’s 180,000-ton figure is therefore well below that earlier commitment to the same startup, though Meta’s is described as a minimum. Sublime would be serving at least two hyperscalers from its first plants.

The Stegra deal carries a different kind of risk. The Swedish company has needed fresh money to finish its Boden plant, with a €1.4 billion financing round reported by SteelOrbis. Meta’s wording, supporting the facility “through its production ramp,” suggests it is buying into a plant that is not yet running at full capacity. The announcement does not say how much steel Meta will back or whether any will reach its sites.

What the announcement does not settle

The claims about jobs, plant timelines and lower emissions come from Meta and its partners and are not independently verified in the announcement. Meta does not say how much carbon each deal avoids, or how EAC-based claims will appear in its Scope 3 accounting. Meta’s accountants’ review of its sustainability data notes that Scope 3 figures rely on a significant number of estimates, so any benefit from these certificates will be hard to separate from modeling assumptions.

Meta says it wants lower carbon cement, steel, recycled plastics and electric freight to become standard options for any builder, and invites more buyers to join. That outcome depends on whether the Sublime, Fortera, Stegra and MacroCycle plants reach commercial output. The announcement sets no timetable for that.