The Brief

The Week in impact investing: Power surge

ImpactAlpha · May 8, 2026

TGIF, Agents of Impact! 

In today’s Brief:

  • Roundup: Fever dream
  • Podcasts: Carrie Endries, Joy Anderson and David Bank
  • Event: Katapult Future Fest

🗣 Fever dream. The world is going crazy, and the finance bros are downright giddy over the profit potential. At the Milken Global conference this week, the usual do-gooder vibe was replaced by a dealmaker delirium over the $800 billion or so that Big Tech firms plan to spend this year on the AI buildout, and the boost to bottom lines that cutting white collar jobs could bring, David Bank reported from Beverly Hills, Calif. As Nvidia’s Jenson Huang explained, the agentic phase of AI requires 1,000 times more processing power than the already astronomical “compute” that was needed for generative AI just two years ago. 

That demand is buoying renewable energy deployment, and plumping private equity coffers, as Erik Stein and I wrote. “The AI capex wave is the single largest accidental subsidy to climate infrastructure in the last 20 years,” declared Yoann Berno of Climate Insiders. You needn’t even care about global warming to invest in clean energy: This week, Palantir cofounder and climate skeptic Peter Thiel led the $140 million Series B round for Oregon-based Panthalassa, which makes floating data centers powered by clean energy from ocean waves. By the same token, you may care about climate, as the responsible AI standard-bearer Anthropic says it does, and still strike a deal with Elon Musk to source computing power from xAI’s gas-powered Colossus data center in Memphis. The 300-megawatt, 785,000-square-foot Colossus, built with little public input, has been slammed as the area’s latest environmental injustice. 

Out of fashion in some circles, Agents of Impact are far from out of energy. In Europe, new funds are coming forward to help the arts and creative sectors make the jump from grants to investments, too, as Danielle Rossingh reported. Likewise, investors such as Kenya-based AT4D are supporting ventures that are making life easier for Africans with disabilities, as Lucy Ngige explored. Erik chronicled Potencia Ventures’ role in building Latin America’s impact ecosystem and seeding early impact funds. Latimpacto’s Catalina Herrera called for more such “market-architecting” in the region. In their own guest post, Jim Sorenson of Sorenson Impact Foundation and Terrence Keeley of Impact Evaluation Lab highlighted the shift at the recent Faith in the Common Good conference in Paris, from what faith-based investors are against, to what they are for. What might that be? Human flourishing. Come to think of it, that’s a worthy mission for AI, and for finance as well. – Amy Cortese

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The Week’s Podcasts

🎧 This Week in Impact. Host Brian Walsh takes up ImpactAlpha’s top stories with editor David Bank. Up this week: Navigating the fear and frenzy at Milken’s annual gathering of global capital players; how the war with Iran is a boon for renewable energy and the private equity that invests in it; and the strange bedfellows backing a company building floating data centers in the ocean.

🦸 Agents of Impact: How a financial advisor in Boston helps clients drive local impact. Investors in deep-blue Boston that are unhappy with the drift of federal policy can find alternative approaches in their own backyards. Many clients of Boston-based Reynders McVeigh are willing to trade off maximized returns for local impact, says advisor Carrie Endries. “We look for options where they can feel like they’re having a real, tangible effect on neighborhoods around them.” 

📯 Criterion Institute Podcast: Intermediation is not overhead. Host Joy Anderson explores the practice of innovative finance to help organizations reframe the question, “How do we get more funding?” with a deeper understanding of the movement of capital through economic systems.

Impact Events

Katapult Future Fest returns to gather a ‘coalition of the willing’ in Amsterdam. Katapult Future Fest is back. The conference, which founder Tharald Nustad calls “the fusion of SOCAP, Burning Man and Singularity University,” will return this month after a one-year hiatus, this time in Amsterdam. Amid geopolitical upheaval, the event is intended to help impact investors and systems-change practitioners find their place. “We have a coalition of the willing,” says KFF’s Evita Zanuso, who helped the event move from Oslo. “The year off made us see that bridging and connections and collaboration are even more important than before.” The conference theme, “Entering the Metamorphosis,” Nustad says, calls out the transition “from the extractive industrial society to the regenerative collaborative society.”

  • RSVP today for Katapult Future Fest, May 27-29 in Amsterdam. Use the code IA-FRIENDS for 20% off.

And don’t miss these other ImpactAlpha partner events:

The Week’s Dealflow, Talent and Jobs

💼 See and share a dozen new impact jobs posted this week on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub and view hundreds of more jobs in impact investing and sustainable finance. Have a job listing to post? Submit it here. And catch up on all of this week’s dealflow reporting. 

ImpactAlpha’s fellowship program is open. Fellows will work within ImpactAlpha’s data team and also have the option of working in the editorial, product, customer success or sales teams. Apply here. 

Amanda Koppang Willfors joined Swedfund as senior impact manager… Catherine Covington stepped down from MCE Social Capital as managing director… Ron Cordes was appointed strategic advisor at Developing World Markets… Amy Sorensen Ben Dov was appointed chair of the board of trustees for the Nathan Cummings Foundation… Brad Parry of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation in Utah was awarded the $50,000 Schnitzer Prize of the West for a land and water restoration project in Idaho. 

Kirstine Lund Christiansen joined Nykredit as head of sustainable finance… Supply Change Capital added Ben Steingold, an MBA candidate at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, as a fellow… Justice Climate Fund promoted Elizabeth McKinsey to managing director of strategic partnerships… Social Finance tapped Stephanie Van Sprang, formerly with Inspiring Minds, as senior associate of partnerships and philanthropy… Janet Yim, previously with Aetna, joined Town Hall Ventures as head of platform.

That’s a wrap. Have a wonderful weekend. 

– May 8, 2026