Portfolio Spotlight: NeoCarbon — Turning Data Center Waste Heat into Cooling Efficiency & Carbon Removal
This series highlights the companies Carbon Drawdown Initiative has invested in.
Data centers are the backbone of the digital world.They also generate enormous amounts of low-grade waste heat and face growing cooling constraints as power densities rise.
NeoCarbon asked a simple but powerful question: What if waste heat wasn’t wasted but transformed into operational and sustainable value?
From Berlin, With Conviction
Founded in 2022 and based in Berlin, NeoCarbon is a deep-tech startup with a bold vision:
To make carbon-negative solutions integral to industrial infrastructure.
Instead of building remote gigafactories competing for scarce green electricity, NeoCarbon integrates directly into existing industrial sites — starting with data centers — and turns waste into value.
At the helm:
● Dr. Tobias Sodoge, CEO & Late Co-Founder — PhD in Mathematics, former Associate Partner at McKinsey, with deep expertise in the energy transition and industrial decarbonization.
● Silvain Toromanoff, CTO & Co-Founder — Engineer and serial entrepreneur who previously founded and exited a technology venture to a publicly listed Swedish group.
This is a team that understands both deep science and industrial execution.
Direct Air Capture — Integrated, Not Isolated
Direct Air Capture has a scaling challenge.
Removing CO₂ from ambient air requires clean energy and that energy is already in high demand across the economy. Many DAC concepts therefore gravitate toward large, remote facilities built specifically for carbon removal with little to no additional operational benefits.
NeoCarbon takes a different route.
Their conviction is simple: carbon removal will only scale if it integrates into existing infrastructure and provides real operational benefits to industrial players.
Data centers are a natural starting point.
They are expanding rapidly. Power densities are rising. Cooling has become one of their central constraints. At the same time, operators face increasing pressure to decarbonize without compromising reliability.
What makes data centers particularly interesting is this:
They generate significant amounts of low-grade waste heat
Cooling performance directly impacts operational efficiency
Sustainability and regulatory targets are becoming business-critical
And every data center produces something in abundance: waste heat.
NeoCarbon’s system uses that heat and puts it to work. Instead of letting it blow into the air , the heat becomes the energy source for Direct Air Capture. The DAC unit is embedded directly into the facility’s infrastructure, turning a thermal byproduct into a climate asset.
The outcome is structural:
Reduced cooling electricity demand by lowering the heat on the site’s infrastructure
CO₂ captured directly from the atmosphere whereafter it will be permanently stored
Water captured from ambient air, eliminating competition on fresh water sources to run datacenters
What was once waste becomes valuable.
This is not carbon removal competing with infrastructure.
It is carbon removal strengthening it.
Milestones & Momentum
NeoCarbon is now transitioning from R&D into early commercial pilots.
They have secured their first proof-of-concept partnerships and are moving toward real-world deployment.
Three key milestones mark this next phase:
Q4 2025 – Selected to join the Net Zero Innovation Hub for Data Centers, a leading Nordic-European initiative accelerating net-zero operations in the data center industry with founding members including Google and Microsoft.
Q1 2026 – Received the official confirmation of a multi-million-euro public grant from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWK). This funding will support the research and development of NeoCarbon’s next-generation DAC system.
2026 – Deployment of NeoCarbon’s third DAC unit, and the first at a live data center plant, demonstrating the value of their integrated carbon-negative and water-positive solution.
This is where theory becomes infrastructure.
Why This Matters
To reach net zero, we need carbon removal at scale.
But scale will not come from isolated pilot plants competing for green power.
It will come from integration.
From systems that:
Solve operational challenges
Improve economics for partners
Deliver measurable carbon removal
NeoCarbon’s approach aligns climate incentives with industrial performance.
That’s how industries change.
Why We Invested
At Carbon Drawdown Initiative, we believe the future of carbon removal lies in pragmatic integration – not idealistic isolation.
NeoCarbon embodies this mindset.
They are not asking industries to sacrifice performance for sustainability.They are improving performance through sustainability.
We don’t need perfect. We need scalable, real-world solutions that fit into how our infrastructure already works.
NeoCarbon is building exactly that.
To learn more, visit:https://neocarbon.tech/
