AI for American-Produced Cement and Concrete

Summary

Meta is continuing its long-term roadmap to help the construction industry leverage AI to produce high-quality and more sustainable concrete mixes, as well as those exclusively produced in the United States. Concurrent with the 2026 American Concrete Institute (ACI) Spring Convention, Meta is releasing a new AI model for designing concrete mixes – Bayesian Optimization for Concrete (BOxCrete), as well as the foundational data used to develop award-winning concrete mixes. Meta’s open source model for sustainable concrete is available today on GitHub. Every year, the United States pours roughly 400 million cubic yards of concrete, enough concrete to pave a two-lane highway that circles the Earth multiple times. It’s the backbone of our bridges, data centers, highways, and homes. However, while we produce most of our ready-mix concrete domestically, we import nearly a quarter of the cement that makes it. Meta’s AI is helping change that. Concrete consists of a mix of cement and cementitious materials, aggregates, water, and chemical admixtures. Concrete suppliers have to design concrete mixes to meet competing requirements: strength, speed, ease of handling, cost, and sustainability. Traditional concrete mix design relies heavily on trial-and-error in the lab, engineer intuition, and decades of accumulated knowledge—a workflow that is slow and expensive to adapt. Cement is a key element of concrete, thus imported cement can have a significant impact on U.S. suppliers, stifling U.S. manufacturing, jobs and investments. While ready-mix concrete is typically produced domestically, the cement required for it is heavily imported, with roughly 20-25% of U.S. cement consumption met by imports. Additionally, cement made in the U.S. complies with U.S. performance and environmental standards that are not consistent internationally. At the same time, ensuring products are produced domestically—a process often called reshoring — generally increases manufacturing jobs in the United...