The largest cleantech venture deal anywhere in the world in Q1 2026 was not a battery company, a solar manufacturer, or a fusion start-up. It was DayOne, a Singapore-based data center developer, which raised $2B in growth equity from Coatue and the Indonesia Investment Authority (INA). DayOne specializes in the design and engineering of prefabricated high-performance compute modules that can be deployed as standalone facilities or in clusters.
EPG, also based in Singapore, raised $100M in a Series B for its own modular and prefabricated data center infrastructure. Together, these two deals accounted for more than $2.1B, roughly 70% of all APAC cleantech venture capital in the quarter.
This concentration of capital should come as no surprise. It’s become the norm the world over, with much of the world’s focus narrowing to the thematic imperative of securing AI infrastructure capabilities.
Perhaps more significantly, the DayOne deal shows a shifting of perceptions in APAC, with INA, Indonesia’s sovereign wealth fund, willing to put national-level backing behind a data center company. Coatue’s endorsement shouldn’t be overlooked either. The fund is clearly seeing potential for data center returns in APAC—read further down on Coatue’s bets in APAC “AI Factories”.
Further “under the hood” of the data center wave are the components and systems to optimize power usage and reduce power consumption at the chip level—there is APAC innovation to be seen at each part of the stack.
We’ve covered Firmus Technologies’ meteoric rise continuously over the past 2 years—a journey from scaling “HyperCube” immersion cooling rooms inside of data centers to now launching large-scale “AI Factories”. Now there’s another milestone to count, with the company’s early April announcement that it had raised a fresh $505M in pursuit of its ambitious Project Southgate in Australia.
While we did not record any chip or semiconductor deals for high-performance in APAC this past quarter, we do expect this trend to pick back up: see the trend below, where APAC-based semiconductor manufacturing tech was a critical underpinning of the energy-efficient compute theme in APAC 2020 – Q1 2026. There are signals elsewhere, too. Self-sufficiency drives in telecom equipment are picking up across APAC—see AGNIT Semiconductors’ $2.6M Seed round in March (AGNIT is producing gallium nitride semiconductors for defense, aerospace, and telecommunications).
Indian Innovation Is Diversifying—Can It Capitalize on Global Fragmentation?
India accounted for 23 of the 46 APAC cleantech deals in Q1 2026, exactly half by count, though a smaller share by dollar value at roughly $238M. The numbers in Q1 tell a continued story of Indian innovation in electric mobility, see our capture last year of the “Made in India, for India” success cases. And while electric mobility again was the most active category, we have reason to believe that the current global geopolitical fractures will create competitive openings for India to grow cleantech export businesses.
Electric mobility remains the most active category. Euler Motors, a manufacturer of electric light commercial vehicles and a 2021 APAC Cleantech 25 company, raised $47M in growth equity from Lightrock and Hero Motocorp, the latter being one of India’s largest two-wheeler manufacturers, now backing the electrification of commercial fleets. Euler Motors is transitioning from innovator to national champion, citing that it now holds a 22% market share for electric four-wheel cargo vehicles in India.
Alongside electric vehicles themselves, Indian innovation continues to support a growing electric mobility infrastructure ecosystem.
Transvolt brought in $15M in growth equity from Finnfund to support scaling of fleet to 3,500 heavy commercial vehicles and expand into e-buses, e-trucks.
Take note of more U.S. and European investors engaging Indian innovation; we expect more global investors to engage India to benefit from predictable electric mobility growth without the same political scrutiny that U.S. investments in China can bring. This is not limited to domestic markets in India or to electric mobility: we expect battery and heavy electrical equipment manufacturing in India to begin playing a bigger role in global export markets. Take, for example, Ayr Energy, backed by Energy Impact Partners, which recently announced $500M in contracts for projects totaling 20GW of capacity in the U.S.
State Capital Continues to Be a Ready Tool for APAC Innovation
One of the defining features of APAC cleantech investment in Q1 2026 is who is writing the checks. Across the region’s largest deals, government-backed funds, state-owned banks, and sovereign investors showed up repeatedly.
Startorus Fusion (2025 APAC Cleantech 25 awardee), a Chinese developer of spherical tokamak fusion technologies, raised $143.3M in a Series A backed heavily by state-affiliated capital. The syndicates included CICC Capital, Shanghai STVC Group, Shanghai Future-Oriented Industries Fund, Shanghai Jiading Technology Investment Group, and BOC Asset Management, among others. This is not the case of a government writing a single anchor check alongside private VCs. It is a coordinated deployment of public capital into a strategic energy technology (fusion) that China appears determined to lead.
Windrose Technology, a Hong Kong-based manufacturer of electric long-haul trucks, closed a $100M growth equity round backed by China Mobile Chain Builder Fund, the Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, and Agricultural Bank of China. Four state-owned financial institutions, all backing a single electric trucking company. The signal is hard to miss: China’s state apparatus views electrification of heavy transport as a strategic priority and is deploying capital accordingly.
Japan offered its own version of the trend. MiRESSO, a developer of beryllium materials critical to both nuclear fusion and fission applications, raised $26.6M in a Series A with a syndicate that reads like a who’s who of Japanese corporate and institutional capital: Spiral Capital, SBI Investment, ITOCHU Technology Ventures, NTT Docomo Ventures, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and Mitsui & Co. In Japan, it is common for government bodies to back investment funds and be minority shareholders in conglomerates. Beyond that, the concentration of major industrial conglomerates around a fusion materials company is notable, especially at a moment where Japanese innovators in fusion continue fast progression and milestone success. Make sure to catch MiRESSO speaking at the ‘Nuclear in the Future Energy Mix’ panel at Cleantech Forum Asia, coming up next month.
The broader point is this: while policy debates in North America and Europe have introduced uncertainty regarding subsidies, tax credits, and regulatory frameworks, governments in APAC are moving in the opposite direction. They are deploying capital directly, through sovereign funds, state banks, national reconstruction vehicles, and coordinated corporate-government syndicates. For cleantech innovators, that creates a fundamentally different investment environment, one where state conviction acts as both a funding source and a demand signal.