Microsoft has signed a deal worth an estimated $1.7 billion to inject human waste deep underground as part of a carbon removal initiative — a move raising alarm among critics who say it will contaminate America’s water supply.
The deal comes as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates continues to quietly acquire U.S. farmland at an unprecedented scale. Gates is now the largest private farmland owner in the country, with much of the land sitting directly atop vital aquifers— underground freshwater reserves that supply millions of Americans.
Critics say this isn’t about agriculture. It’s about control. By owning the land above key water tables — and supporting waste injection projects beneath them — Gates is positioning himself to influence not just food systems, but the nation’s most essential resource: water.
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The latest project is a partnership between Microsoft and Vaulted Deep, a startup that processes manure, sewage, and agricultural byproducts into a thick slurry and injects it approximately 5,000 feet below the Earth’s surface. The company claims the method traps carbon and reduces emissions that would otherwise be released through traditional disposal.
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“Generally, what happens to these wastes today is they go to a landfill, they get dumped in a waterway, or they’re just spread on land for the purpose of disposal,” said Vaulted CEO Julia Reichelstein in an interview with Inc.. “In all of those cases, they’re decomposing into CO₂ and methane… And then oftentimes, especially when it’s spread on land, all those pathogens are going directly into people’s groundwater.”
Vaulted’s publicly listed carbon removal cost is $350 per metric ton. With Microsoft’s contract covering 4.9 million metric tons of waste over 12 years, the total value could exceed $1.7 billion.
While Gates and Microsoft are framing the deal as a climate-forward solution, critics warn that injecting waste underground near critical water reserves carries long-term environmental risks — especially when combined with Gates’s ongoing acquisition of farmland and water-rich regions.
“This isn’t just about emissions or carbon credits. It’s about who owns the inputs to life,” said one analyst familiar with Gates’s land deals. “When you control the land above the aquifers, and now the waste going below them, you have leverage over what everyone downstream depends on.”
Gates’s land grab has occurred in parallel with his alliances with powerful global entities like BlackRock and former Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, who once said water should not be a human right.
Brabeck has long pushed for water privatization, and many see Gates’s land strategy as a quiet but effective method of doing just that — by owning the access points to natural water infrastructure.
Microsoft has previously signed climate offset contracts with firms like AtmosClear, agreeing to sequester millions of metric tons of CO₂. But the Vaulted Deep deal is notable for its approach: burying biological waste underground rather than removing airborne emissions from industrial sources.
Meanwhile, tech companies including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are investing in nuclear technology to power their rapidly growing data centers, many of which are under fire for their enormous energy consumption. In Memphis, Elon Musk’s company xAI is facing legal action over emissions violations tied to the Colossus supercomputer.
Critics argue that the tech sector’s climate commitments serve as a smokescreen for more concerning environmental experiments — ones that allow unelected corporate actors to reshape ecosystems with little public oversight.
Neither Microsoft nor Vaulted Deep responded to additional requests for comment.
