Meeting Climate Goals Will Depend on the Machines That Run Industry

Last month in New York, world leaders met at the UN Climate Summit during the UN General Assembly, and Climate Week NYC built its program around moving climate goals from ambition to implementation. In less than a month, negotiators will gather in Antalya, Turkey, for COP31.

Between those meetings sit two practical questions that diplomacy cannot settle on its own. What equipment will actually cut emissions, and who will pay to install it? Implementation runs through power grids, factories, data centers, farms and supply chains. Each one already operates at an enormous scale, and changing how it works means replacing or upgrading physical machinery, often one site at a time.

An industrial problem

“Climate is an industrial problem,” says Elliott Parker, CEO of Alloy Partners, a firm that co-creates startups with large corporations. “The technologies that matter most have to work inside energy systems, manufacturing, infrastructure and supply chains that are already enormous.”

That description fits the sectors where emissions are hardest to cut. Steel, cement, chemicals and heavy transport need new processes and materials, not only cleaner electricity. A breakthrough in a lab counts for little until it runs reliably inside a plant that cannot afford downtime.

AI has changed where the money goes

The rapid growth of AI has added new pressure. Data centers need large amounts of power and cooling, and investors have followed that demand. TechCrunch, citing PitchBook data, reported that climate tech venture deal value topped $14 billion in the first quarter of 2026, with most of it in sectors boosted by data center construction, including the built environment, grid infrastructure and dispatchable energy.

Some investors see a trade-off. “Decarb is dead for now,” one venture capitalist told The Wall Street Journal last month. The climate impact of the AI buildout will depend largely on whether new demand is met by low-carbon or fossil-fuel generation.

Resistance is also coming from the communities that host the buildings. Wired reported last month that opposition to data centers in the United States is driven less by global climate worries than by local ones, such as water use, rising electricity bills and pollution. Climate Week NYC itself saw activists interrupt a panel on AI and data centers. For the industry, that makes efficiency a condition for getting projects approved, alongside its value for the climate.

The two goals can overlap. Technologies that cool servers with less energy and water, recover waste heat or help grids absorb new load serve AI growth and emissions reduction at the same time. Those are the categories where hardware startups can find paying customers now.

What scarcity teaches

Countries that have long operated with limited water, land or energy offer a useful view of how resource technology reaches the market. Israel is one example. Modern drip irrigation was developed and commercialized there, and the country now relies on large-scale desalination for much of its drinking water.

That history continues in today’s startups. According to PLANETech, Israel’s climate technology community, more than 1,500 active startups in the country are working on industrial and climate challenges. Research institutions such as the Technion and the Weizmann Institute of Science supply engineering, chemistry and physics talent.

Kerem Nevo, VP and Head of the Growth Division at the Israel Innovation Authority, highlights the links between research and industry. “Our highly interconnected innovation ecosystem has a proven ability to bridge academia and industry, transforming cutting-edge research into commercially viable technologies,” he says.

Global companies and investors already treat Israel as a place to build. According to the Israel Innovation Authority’s 2026 High-Tech Status Report, 511 multinational companies operate in the country. Israeli tech companies raised about $14.6 billion in 2025, up 30% from 2024, and foreign investors accounted for 70% of that venture capital.

Bringing buyers to the technology

Deepening those ties is the purpose of PLANETech Week, which runs October 18-22, featuring nearly 30 events and an expected thousands of attendees. International investors, corporate leaders and delegations will meet Israeli startups working on waste, critical minerals, construction, sustainable aviation fuels, data centers, energy and mobility. Partners include Siemens Energy, Microsoft, Ormat New Ventures and Volkswagen Group’s Konnect innovation hub, alongside the Israel Innovation Authority.

The week’s flagship event, PLANET Connects, takes place October 21 at the Einav Cultural Center in Tel Aviv, with a startup exhibition, a B2B meeting area and a main-stage plenary with international speakers.

“PLANETech Week is designed to bring this ecosystem to the international conversation on climate action and put it in front of the investors and industrial partners who can deploy it at scale,” says Rotem Trivizki, Director of PLANETech.

Companies to watch this week

Several of the companies taking part in PLANETech Week are working on the challenges described above. Their solutions draw on materials science, physics, and chemistry, and are built into technology that has to perform at an industrial scale.

• NanoTherma is developing thin thermoelectric panels built on nanomaterials that capture low-temperature waste heat inside server racks and convert it into electricity.
• IDE Technologies, the Israeli company behind some of the world’s largest desalination plants, offers high-recovery treatment that recycles water from data center cooling towers.
• BH Grid Solutions tracks a data center’s carbon emissions hour by hour and helps operators and tenants shift computing work to cleaner hours and locations.
• Starstone makes a biogenic, zero-carbon cement that reduces reliance on the high-temperature kilns used in traditional cement manufacturing.

The measure that matters

COP31 will produce negotiated text, and climate weeks will produce announcements. The harder test is how many pilots turn into purchase orders, and how many purchase orders become equipment running inside grids, plants and data centers.

That work happens at events like PLANETech Week, in meetings between engineers who have built something and companies with the budget and sites to deploy it. The world’s climate goals will be met or missed in thousands of those decisions.