FINANCE
The scramble now reaches the least glamorous corners of the market, where the electricity gets made and the heat gets used.
In one Finnish town, the AI-cloud firm Nebius now pipes the waste heat from its servers into the municipal radiators, shaving about a tenth off local bills.“ How AI is built matters just as much as what it enables,” says its Head of Sustainability, Daria Mukhortova.
Washington shouts, the money shrugs The backlash, for its part, has not run out of breath. In Washington, the Trump administration is rolling back the subsidies that seeded the boom, communities from Virginia to Kentucky are suing to keep data centres out, and Europe is softening the disclosure rules, the CSRD, that were meant to make sustainability auditable.
US $ 2.2tn record clean-energy investment forecast for 2026, close to double the US $ 1.2tn going to fossil fuels
Source: IEA
The alliances that once herded banks into net-zero pledges have thinned to a shadow. The capital, though, has not blinked, which is the tell.“ The political noise is actually separating the serious businesses from the opportunists,” says Rachel Delacour, Co-Founder and CEO of the sustainability-data platform Sweep. The evidence sits in the mismatch. Morningstar finds that around a quarter of fund managers have dropped the ESG label even as they keep buying the assets it once described.“ Companies are less vocal publicly,” Rachel says,“ but behind the scenes they’ re doubling down.”
Bury the label, keep the money So spare the eulogies. What died in 2025 was a label, not a trade, and the two were never the same thing. Sustainable investment has changed committees, that is all, moving from the desk that writes the mission statement to the desk that signs the cheques. The firms winning now are not the ones with the boldest pledges but the ones that treat the energy transition as infrastructure, long-lived, contracted and cash-generative, and price it like any other asset on the books. The mourners buried the initials and mistook them for the money. Green investment no longer needs the politics to make its case, because it finally has the balance sheet, and a balance sheet does not care what you call it.
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