Every January, when the World Economic Forum comes to town, Davos’ promenade stops being a quaint ski-town main street and becomes a corporate pantheon. The world’s biggest companies take over the storefronts with glossy displays—signals to investors, policymakers, and one another about what matters most.
Six years ago, the promenade was a catwalk for ESG and climate. This year AI was everywhere—seemingly at climate’s expense. But beyond the glossy displays, another conversation was taking hold among tech companies, investors, and project developers: AI will require an enormous amount of electricity to scale. Unlocking its promise means investing in—and partnering with—the energy companies that can deliver power quickly and reliably.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]This has been largely understood as a climate problem. More energy means more emissions. But really it should be understood as a climate opportunity. As companies pour hundreds of billions of dollars into AI, they are also pouring hundreds of billions into energy. And many of the firms positioned to do that happen to be building the clean-energy technologies that could decarbonize the grid at the same time.
“This is one of the largest purchasing budgets in history,” says Chase Lochmiller, the CEO of Crusoe, a data center developer known for treating power supply as its starting point. “It can provide a massive demand signal for new energy technologies that are burgeoning.”
The question now is to what degree those new low-carbon technologies can beat out growth in gas generation.
In a way this insight isn’t new. Over the last two years, as electricity demand started rising in the U.S., power companies offered an enthusiastic narrative arguing that expanding to meet this need would allow them to invest in clean energy. But what struck me in Davos this month was how AI’s capital intensity has turned this from utility talking points into a genuine investment thesis with animal spirits behind it.
To understand that enthusiasm, just look at the companies at the center of the conversation. Some of the darlings on the ground included businesses like Bloom Energy, which builds fuel cells that provide onsite generation. Its stock is up 500% in the last year. Big firms, too, are riding the wave. In Davos, companies like Schneider Electric and Johnson Controls touted their efficiency technologies, and have seen their stock rise to boot. Constellation Energy, whose stock has more than doubled in the last two years, talked about the bright future for nuclear power as data center developers race to buy the company’s low-carbon electrons.
The other thing that struck me in Davos is the role of the data center developers. In much of the broader climate zeitgeist, tech companies and data center developers are the villains because they are producing new sources of emissions. This may be true in a sense, but it is also true that they are a key driver of demand for clean power—especially in the U.S.—at a time when the political winds are not in favor of anything green-tinged. “The number one factor in terms of building new data centers is the availability of land with, ideally, clean power,” said Abhijit Dubey, president and CEO of NTT DATA, on a TIME panel in Davos. “Do we have actual clean power available? That defines where we are building data centers.”
To be clear, despite what some of the most committed data center developers may say, a substantial portion of new electricity demand in the U.S., the world’s biggest market for data centers, will be met with gas power. And Washington has used data center expansion as a pretext to insist that coal-fired power plants remain online, too.
But one thing I keep coming back to in 2026 is that from an emissions perspective the U.S. isn’t the only place that matters, even as data centers present new challenges to decarbonization. If today’s investments can actually make clean energy cheaper and more reliable than fossil fuels, the AI boom might end up accelerating decarbonization globally, even if it creates near-term emissions challenges in the U.S.
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This story is supported by a partnership with Outrider Foundation and Journalism Funding Partners. TIME is solely responsible for the content.
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