AI datacenter demand lifts climate tech funding to $26.1 billion in H1

Climate tech startups raised $26.1 billion in venture funding in the first six months of 2026, the sector’s strongest first half since 2022, according to investment tracker Currence. The increase, up 55% from a year earlier, was driven largely by low-carbon datacenter and power infrastructure tied to AI compute demand rather than a broad rebound across the category.

Low-carbon datacenter developers accounted for 34% of climate venture dollars in the period, Currence said, compared with 3% in the same period a year earlier. Two rounds alone, DayOne’s $4.5 billion financing and Nscale’s $2 billion Series C, represented about a quarter of total climate tech investment between them.

The result was a sharp shift in where climate investors are putting money. Currence said the built environment category grew more than eightfold and passed energy as the largest climate tech vertical. The report also shows how much the definition of climate tech is being stretched by the AI infrastructure cycle.

Currence said climate tech is now “a bigger space than it was six years ago,” and pointed to datacenters as demand drivers for long-duration storage, advanced nuclear, geothermal power, robotics and space-based solar. The firm said it includes datacenter developers that mainly use clean power or make sustainability a central part of the business, while excluding conventional datacenters and chipmakers.

That classification choice matters. It means a significant portion of climate venture growth is now tied to companies whose core customer demand comes from AI infrastructure buildouts. Currence’s report said datacenter developers are being assessed on their “route to power” alongside racks and real estate, and argued that clean firm power can be an edge in the race to secure electricity.

Capital is concentrating in fewer, larger deals

The sector’s headline funding growth came with a narrower base. Currence said deal count fell 25% even as total funding rose, and the 10 largest rounds made up 42% of all dollars invested. That level of concentration makes the market look less like classic venture funding and more like infrastructure finance, especially where datacenters, generation assets and grid constraints are involved.

The AI link showed up beyond datacenter developers. Currence said investors are backing nuclear startups at early stages, years before those companies are expected to produce electricity, on the assumption that future AI power demand will support current valuations. The report did not provide company-level valuation details for those nuclear investments.

Earth observation funding tripled, which Currence linked to demand for larger real-world datasets used in AI model training. Robotics startups focused on foundational models, training data and simulation platforms raised nearly four times as much as the next largest innovation category, according to the report.

Carbon-related equity funding moved in the opposite direction. Currence said the category dropped 61% to its weakest first half since 2020, while capital shifted toward technologies connected to AI infrastructure, including datacenters, generation and grid capacity.

The pattern is clear from the numbers Currence reported: climate tech funding is growing, but the growth is being pulled toward the compute supply chain. For founders and investors, the category’s center of gravity has moved closer to power procurement, project development and infrastructure-scale balance sheets than to the broader decarbonization themes that defined earlier climate venture cycles.

This story draws on original reporting from The Register.