A collaboration between the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Meta, and Amrize has been recognized with a 2025 Slag Cement in Sustainable Concrete Project of the Year award for the Meta AI-Designed Mix for the Rosemount Data Center in Minnesota. Presented by the Slag Cement Association in the Lower Carbon Concrete category, the award highlights a project that brought together university research, artificial intelligence, and industry implementation to advance more sustainable concrete construction.
The collaboration builds on research led by Nishant Garg, associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, whose team worked with Meta and Amrize to develop AI-optimized concrete mixtures for large-scale data center construction. Recent Meta and Amrize coverage describes an iterative workflow that combined lab testing of 100+ unique recipes with an open-source AI model (BOxCrete) to produce an optimized mix with stronger early-age mechanical performance, lower carbon intensity, and practical field deployment in a critical section of the Rosemount data center.
This recognition underscores how Illinois research can move from the laboratory into full-scale infrastructure.
"This award reflects what becomes possible when academic research is tightly connected to industry and practice," Garg said. "It is especially rewarding to see work developed in our lab at Illinois contribute to a real data center in Minnesota at scale, where performance, cost, speed, and sustainability all matter."
As demand for data centers continues to grow, the project also illustrates how data-driven concrete mix design can help shape the next generation of construction. By combining Illinois expertise in concrete materials with Meta's AI tools and Amrize's materials and deployment capabilities, the partnership demonstrates a model for accelerating innovation in next generation concrete for major infrastructure applications. Garg supervised graduate students Bayezid Baten and Ayyan Iqbal who led a team of students to generate the open-access dataset at Newmark Civil Engineering Lab that trained the AI model.
The award was presented at the American Concrete Institute (ACI) Spring 2026 Concrete Convention in Chicago, Ill., where Garg was also honored with the ACI Young Member Award for Professional Achievement for contributions to the development of analytical techniques for concrete characterization, and for training numerous young researchers.
Garg joined the CEE at Illinois in 2018, where he leads Garg Group which focuses on applied advanced characterization techniques to probe the chemistry of construction materials, and has developed patent-pending ultra-rapid testing methods. His other recent honors include the 2021 Stephen Brunauer Award and 2025 Early Career Award from the American Ceramic Society, and the 2025 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research at Illinois.
The following article is available online:
‘BOxCrete: A Bayesian Optimization Open-Source AI Model for Concrete Strength Forecasting and Mix Optimization.’ DOI: arXiv:2603.21525