AI power binge delivers best half since 2022 for climate tech venture funding

AI AND ML

Low-carbon projects reap accidental windfall as billions chase compute infrastructure

Climate tech venture capital had its strongest first half since 2022 as investors poured billions into low-carbon datacenters and projects needed to feed AI's seemingly endless appetite for compute.

According to investment tracker Currence, climate tech startups pulled in $26.1 billion in venture funding during the first six months of 2026, up 55 percent year-over-year.

However, that headline growth came with a catch: investors weren't backing the climate sector broadly so much as pouring money into the infrastructure underpinning the AI boom. Low-carbon datacenter developers alone accounted for 34 percent of all climate venture funding, up from just 3 percent a year earlier, with DayOne's $4.5 billion and Nscale's $2 billion Series C rounds making up roughly a quarter of all investment between them.

As a result, the "built environment" category grew by more than eight times, overtaking "energy" as climate tech's largest investment vertical.

That shift is so dramatic that Currence has effectively rewritten the boundaries of climate tech itself. The firm says climate tech is "a bigger space than it was six years ago," pointing to datacenters as drivers for long-duration energy storage, advanced nuclear, geothermal power, robotics, and even space-based solar. It now counts datacenter developers that rely primarily on clean power or make sustainability central to their business, while excluding conventional facilities and chipmakers.

"Datacenter development is a crowded space, but in the speed-to-power race, clean firm generation can be a distinct advantage," the report notes, arguing that developers are increasingly judged on their "route to power" as much as their racks and real estate.

The ripple effects stretch well beyond datacenters, according to Currence. Investors are writing large early stage checks to nuclear startups years before they're expected to generate electricity, betting AI's long-term appetite for power will eventually justify today's valuations, while Earth observation funding has tripled as developers seek larger stores of real-world data to train AI models.

Robotics startups developing foundational models, training data, and simulation platforms also raised nearly four times as much as the next biggest innovation category.

Carbon-related equity funding was one of the few categories to decline sharply, falling 61 percent to its weakest first half since 2020, while money poured into the technologies supporting the AI buildout.

The narrowing focus showed up elsewhere too. Overall deal count fell 25 percent even as funding surged, with the ten largest rounds accounting for 42 percent of all investment. Currence says the concentration of capital in huge datacenter and energy projects is pushing climate venture funding closer to infrastructure finance.

The report may be about climate tech, but the money is following AI infrastructure: datacenters, power generation, grid capacity, and anything else that might keep the compute boom switched on. ®