12 investors dish on what 2026 will bring for climate tech

This was supposed to be the year that climate tech died.

President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have done their best to dismantle the Biden administration’s hallmark industrial and climate policies. Even the European Union has begun to ease off its most aggressive goals.

And yet, as the year closes the receipts provide a different view of climate and clean energy investing in the U.S. and Europe. Instead of tanking, venture bets in the sector remained essentially flat relative to 2024, according to CTVC, far from the slide some had expected.

That resiliency is due in part to continued threat of climate change. Perhaps a bigger contributing factor is that many climate technologies have become either cheaper or better than the fossil fuel alternatives — or are on the cusp of being so.

The incredible cost reductions of solar, wind, and batteries continue to fill climate tech’s sails. Not every new technology will follow the same path. But it does provide evidence that fossil fuels aren’t invincible and ample opportunities to fund companies providing cleaner, cheaper replacements do exist.

Data centers continue to dominate

Last year, I predicted that 2025 would be the year that climate tech learned to love AI and its thirst for electricity, one that has largely borne out. It’s not entirely surprising — for the climate tech world, cheap, clean energy is its cornerstone.

Interest in data centers has only increased in the last year. And investors TechCrunch surveyed were nearly unanimous in their agreement that data centers will remain at the center of the conversation in 2026.

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“They are creating their own financial ecosystem, and there is enough actual momentum in current AI efforts that I don’t see the hyperscalers pulling back in 2026,” Tom Chi, founding partner at At One Ventures, told TechCrunch.

“I’m still hearing about an ever increasing concentration of effort and focus on data centers virtually every single day in meetings, especially with corporates,” Po Bronson, managing director at SOSV’s IndieBio, told TechCrunch.

In 2025, data centers were obsessed with securing new sources of power. But Lisa Coca, partner at Toyota Ventures, thinks they’ll adjust their focus for 2026. “The 2026 data center energy conversation is likely to shift from demand to resilience and the need to accelerate plans to decouple from the grid,” she said. Decoupling could solve some challenges that data centers face, namely in resistance from grid operators and the public, who are increasingly worried that the new loads are driving up their electricity prices.

There will still be the need for more power, though, and investors saw geothermal, nuclear, solar, and batteries as having benefitted from the boom. “Zero-carbon generation is already among the cheapest sources of power, and growing demand for both grid-scale and distributed batteries is accelerating cost reductions faster than expected,” said Daniel Goldman, managing partner at Clean Energy Ventures.

Investors also acknowledged the AI bubble might burst; some voiced skepticism about whether it would drag the energy sector down with it.

“Could a bubble burst in 2026? Sure,” said Kyle Teamey, managing partner at RA Capital Planetary Health. But it’s not likely to affect infrastructure plans, he added. “The spending for 2026 is already budgeted. The train has left the station.”

Andrew Beebe, managing director at Obvious Ventures, thinks the data center bubble might burst in 2026 or early 2027, but that no such bubble exists in electricity generation. “We still need a LOT more power, and we’ll use that — no build-out bubble there…yet.”

Outside of AI and data centers, Anil Achyuta, partner at Energy Impact Partners, said reindustrialization will take more of the spotlight this year. “We need to rebuild supply chains for systems that require multiple components and complex flowsheets,” he said, citing robotics, batteries, and power electronics as examples.

The continuing quest for power

Thanks to the drumbeat of new data center announcements, energy-related startups have gotten a boost this past year, perhaps none more than those working on nuclear fission. In the last few weeks, nuclear startups have announced rounds totaling over $1 billion, leading to speculation that many will SPAC or go public through a traditional IPO in 2026.

“Nuclear everything is in vogue right now,” Teamey said.

But it will take a while for nuclear power to make a dent in electricity demand. In the meantime, tech companies and data center developers have been turning to solar and batteries as inexpensive, rapidly deployable power sources. Grid-scale batteries, in particular, have been a major beneficiary, seeing record-setting deployments in 2025. As alternative battery chemistries like sodium-ion and zinc come to market, they stand to lower costs and drive further adoption.

“We’ll see growth in 2026 with new plays on [battery] chemistry and business models.” said Leo Banchik, director at Voyager. “One of the key lessons from earlier failures was scaling gigafactories before proving demand or achieving better unit economics than the status quo. The new wave is more disciplined.”

Several investors felt geothermal would step in to help fill the void in the coming years. It helps that investors see enhanced geothermal as a relatively mature technology that’s ready to deploy at larger scales in 2026.

“Geothermal will be hot on solar’s heals in terms of new generation,” said Joshua Posamentier, managing partner at Congruent Ventures. “Natural gas assets are growing pretty linearly. There’s not much new capacity in turbine manufacturing coming online, and they’re selling everything they can. Geothermal will go geometric.”

And while AI is helping to drive demand, companies and technologies that think beyond the data center will benefit the most, said Laurie Menoud, founding partner at At One Ventures.