How AI Split Climate Tech in Two

It’s another hectic and productive Climate Week in New York City, full of discussions on topics ranging from electrification, to permitting reform (the latest: it’s going to wait until after the midterms), to energy security amid soaring oil and gas prices, to, inevitably, the ways the data center buildout is both helping and hurting climate tech companies and emissions targets alike.

As usual, cadres of venture capitalists descended on Midtown Manhattan, bringing with them the particular brand of optimism that venture inherently requires. They touted the potential synergies between cleantech and the artificial intelligence boom, bemoaned the persistent “missing middle” funding gap, and debated ways to talk about climate without actually saying the word climate. Through it all, a few core themes emerged.

The first was the inescapable truth that the American economy is being hugely buoyed by AI right now. At our Heatmap House event on Wednesday, I asked Gabriel Kra, co-founder of early-stage climate tech investment firm Prelude Ventures, about the successful IPOs of geothermal company Fervo and nuclear energy company X-Energy. I wondered aloud whether their ability to reach that milestone said less about broad cleantech enthusiasm than it did about their hyperscaler customer base and its desperation for clean, firm power.

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He was nonplussed. “So wait, you’re asking if the current IPOs are reflective of the current economic environment?” he joked (sort of). “It’s likely that this country is in a zero growth or recessionary environment without the capital expenditures and the economic growth being driven by those same hyperscalers. And those hyperscalers are driving the largest change in the demand for energy, the largest change in the demand for electricity that we have seen in like a century.”

Point taken.

Dawn Lippert, founder of the philanthropically funded nonprofit investment firm Elemental Impact and its offshoot venture fund, Earthshot Ventures, likewise emphasized the opportunity to ride AI’s momentum to deploy cleantech in and around data centers. Elemental recently launched the Data Center Innovation Initiative, a partnership between climate tech startups, philanthropic organizations, and four hyperscalers — Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta — to fund and pilot solutions such as low-carbon building materials, energy efficiency infrastructure, cooling solutions, and energy storage.

“We all feel a little bit used by data centers,” Lippert told me onstage at Heatmap House. “We thought, how can you actually use data centers to do the things that we need to do as society? And pulling forward clean energy technologies and sustainable technologies is one of the most interesting ways that they can be a real service to society.”

But she admitted that the data center story has essentially bifurcated the climate tech industry into the haves and have-nots. “We certainly see this as a tale of two sectors.” She told me. On the other, less fortunate, side of the equation, she listed companies working on lowering emissions in the food and agriculture supply chain. While she didn’t name names, that could mean everything from alternative protein startups to companies working to curb cattle’s methane emissions or developing alternatives to synthetic fertilizers.

Nature-based solutions are also faring poorly in the current environment, Lippert told me. That could include carbon removal companies pursuing everything from reforestation to enhanced rock weathering. “I think we need much more catalytic capital to make sure that companies and really good innovations can weather this storm that we have,” she told me, referring to those being left behind as AI sucks all of the attention and money out of the room.

Another theme that emerged was pushback to the notion that backing infrastructure-intensive climate tech solutions is necessarily incompatible with traditional venture timelines — or that taking longer when needed somehow makes those investments less worthwhile.

“I am proving you can have exits of very substantial fund returners in less than 10 years,” Katie Rae, CEO of the MIT-affiliated VC Engine Ventures, told me onstage at Heatmap House. “So I don’t know, do I need a longer timeline than software needs? Looks like I don’t.” She currently sits on the board of a number of prominent climate tech startups, including long-duration storage company Form Energy and Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Many in the industry are speculating that both could go public in the next few years, potentially putting them just within the 10-year mark from Engine Ventures’ first seed check to exit.

At an event I moderated on Monday at fusion company Thea Energy’s New Jersey headquarters, investors in the four-year-old startup told the audience they’re perfectly willing to wait until the mid-2030s for Thea to put its first fusion electrons on the grid. “The thing that we came up against when we were underwriting Thea is something that you hear all the time with fusion,” Pete Mathias, a general partner at the early-stage firm Reveille VC, told me. “Oh, it’s going to take 10, 15, years. And oh, it’s going to take a billion dollars. Well, yeah, I mean, so did DoorDash. They raised $2.5 billion dollars to bring food to your doorstep.”

You could practically hear his eyes rolling at the comparable triviality. “So when you look on a relative basis what the mission of this company is, the scale of the opportunity, the durability of the product, the kilowatt-hour cost of energy — it’s a much more investable case.”

This year’s biggest energy IPOs, Fervo and X-Energy, also challenge the notion that profitability must precede public market success. “If you told me a geothermal company that had not produced commercial electricity and a nuclear company that had not produced any commercial electricity were about to be multi-billion-dollar public companies [...] and tried to raise money from me five or 10 years ago, based on that premise, I would have said you’re crazy,” Kra told me.

In fact, both companies have stated in SEC filings that they expect to continue racking up losses for years, as any fusion company thinking about going public anytime soon would likely do, as well. But much like Fervo and X-Energy’s earliest backers, public market investors bought into the company’s forward-looking vision. “And why could they believe that story?” Kra asked. “They had customers who were willing to pay them money for their product,” he said. Simple as that. Fervo’s early customers include Southern California Edison and Google, while X-Energy plans to sell power to chemical producer Dow and Amazon.

Back at Thea’s event, Mathias threw additional cold water on the idea that traditional venture timelines and the intimidating cost of big infrastructure buildouts should dictate the viability of companies with the potential to fundamentally reshape society. “I thought Climate Week is all about, 100 years from now Planet Earth is on fire,” he said to the crowd. “What is the cost of that? It seems pretty high.”

A few other tidbits of note:

• At Heatmap House, Tom Steyer taught us all a new vocabulary word. In a conversation with my colleague Robinson Meyer that touched on the mistrust pervading so many corners of society — including, but not limited to, AI — Steyer said, “Working people do not think that the panjandrums of Silicon Valley care about them, nor can they be trusted to take care of them, nor do they believe that they will make decisions that will benefit, or even take them into account.” It’s a salient point. Also, panjandrums essentially means bigwigs.
• “If you say climate, that gets tricky. Like we’re not sure what that means. That could be everything from organic yoga mats to fusion energy,” Rae of Engine Ventures told me. Her firm calls its focus “tough tech,” spanning startups working in climate, human health, and advanced systems that are built on breakthroughs in science and engineering. So to be clear, she personally means something more akin to fusion.
• At an event I moderated at the Nest Campus, I asked a panel of venture capitalists what they’re skeptical of at the moment. “One area that we’ve been very cautious on is the space sector and going after it for the sake of being in space,” Peter Hirsch, head of sustainability and partnership at the climate-focused VC 2150, told the group. “You have to be very, very targeted to understand how you’re going to compete against physics, economics, and ultimately a very large incumbent they’re going to have to work against.” That’s SpaceX, folks.
• I also asked about the contrarian bets those same VCs were taking and got a much needed dose of optimism for the embattled agricultural tech sector. “My hot take is that ag is going to have another moment,” Zenetta Burger, a partner at Giant Ventures, told me. “I think we’re in the absolute dip of what agriculture is going to see globally, and it may be a great time to invest.”