Over $1 trillion needed for developing nations’ climate transition, says ex-World Bank official
Smoke billows from an unauthorized steel factory, foreground, on November 4, 2016 in Inner Mongolia, China. To meet China’s targets to slash emissions of carbon dioxide, authorities are pushing to shut down privately owned steel, coal, and other high-polluting factories scattered across rural areas. (Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
Kevin Frayer | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Developing nations will need more than $1 trillion each year to make significant progress in climate transition, according Mari Pangestu, a former World Bank official.
“The estimate is like $1 [trillion] to $3 trillion a year for developing countries to be able to transition,” she told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Thursday.
The lack of funding has made it difficult for those countries to reduce their high carbon emissions and shift to clean energy, Pangestu added. This has led to tensions between developing nations and the developed world, which are pushing for more progress in climate related issues.
“This debate is going to continue unless developed countries can see that this is about development and climate — not just about climate,” Pangestu, a former trade and tourism minister for Indonesia, said.
“And that has been the source of tension. You can’t separate the two,” she added, underlining the “key word is actually — transition.”
“How do you transition from the high emission now to clean energy? It will require us to have resources.”
This was “part of the bone of contention,” for the lack of progress made in the recently concluded Group of 20 climate ministers meeting in India, Pangestu said.
The talks in late July wrapped up without consensus on crucial matters to address the climate crisis such as the issue of financing to support developing countries, the document showed.
India’s climate change minister Bhupender Yadav, who chaired the meeting, acknowledged there had been “some issues about energy, and some target-oriented issues.”
Sharp criticism
The July climate meeting was seen as a chance for the world’s biggest polluters to take concrete steps ahead of a G20 leaders’ meeting in September in New Delhi and the COP28 Summit in the United Arab Emirates in December.
The failure to reach a deal drew withering criticism from environmental activists.
“Europe and North Africa are burning, Asia is ravaged with floods yet G20 climate ministers have failed to agree on a shared direction to halt the climate crisis which is escalating day by day,” said Alex Scott of climate change think-tank E3G.
“Reports of Saudi Arabia and China stifling the forum’s political space to even discuss a new direction on the energy transition fly in the face of their claims of defending the interests of developing countries,” he added.
China rejected reports it had obstructed climate discussions at the G20 climate meeting, saying “relevant reports totally run counter to the facts.”
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs insisted the meeting “achieved positive and balanced outcomes.”
“However, some countries introduced geopolitical issues as an obstruction and the meeting failed to adopt a communique. China finds it regrettable,” the ministry said without elaborating.
‘Scale and urgency’
There’s a “scale and urgency” to address the climate crisis, said Pangestu, adding it requires greater effort from all stakeholders.
“Part of that will have to come from countries’ own resources,” she noted. “Also part of it has to come from multilateral development banks and other sources, which are going to reduce the cost and risks — so that you can get private sector to come in.”
Pangestu argued that if developed nations want to move away from fossil fuels and “retire coals plants early,” more support should be provided to developing countries.
“What South Africa and Indonesia have done more recently on this particular issue is say: ‘That’s fine and well, you want us to get out early’ — but who’s going to fund the cost of getting out early?” she asked.
“These are private companies, you have to also compensate them. There’s a legal issue, financial issue. So this is where we need to really get into the policies and the reforms.”
A Nvidia RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition on display during VivaTech 2025 tech conference in Paris, France.
Chesnot | Getty Images
British artificial intelligence infrastructure firm Nscale is raising heaps of cash as it looks to ramp up the deployment of AI data centers across Europe.
Nscale, which is based in London, said Thursday that it has raised $1.1 billion in a bumper Series B funding round. The investment was led by Aker, the Norwegian industrial investment company, with additional participation from a raft of firms including Nvidia, Nokia and Dell.
The investment highlights continued demand for high-powered computing infrastructure, which is required to train and run powerful foundational AI models from companies like OpenAI, Microsoft and Google.
Nscale has become a central player in Britain’s ambition to become a global AI powerhouse. Last week, the likes of Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI announced multibillion-dollar projects involving Nscale to build out AI computing infrastructure across the U.K.
“We are creating one of the largest global [infrastructure] platforms of its kind – purpose-built to meet surging demand and unlock breakthroughs at unprecedented scale,” said Josh Payne, Nscale’s CEO and co-founder, in a statement.
“This allows Nscale to provide our customers access to scarce, and highly sought after, compute capacity and rapidly accelerate the build-out of secure, compliant and energy-efficient AI infrastructure,” he added.
Nscale was spun out from Arkon Energy, an Australian cryptocurrency mining firm, in 2023 to address soaring demand for data centers capable of handling AI workloads.
It is working with OpenAI in the U.K. and Norway to build new data centers as part of the ChatGPT maker’s Stargate investment project. Nscale said that part of the Series B funding would go toward “enabling the rapid rollout” of the Stargate data center projects in Europe.
The company is committing $1 billion for the Norwegian project, with the goal of racking up 100,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) at the site before 2027. The U.K. site, meanwhile, will house 8,000 GPUs in its first phase early next year, with the option to expand capacity to around 31,000 GPUs over time.
Light uses artificial intelligence to automate companies’ finance and accounting functions.
Light
Danish startup Light is the latest in a series of European tech firms raising cash as venture capitalists search for the next big thing in artificial intelligence.
Founded in 2022, Light develops software that uses AI to automate various functions that exist within businesses’ finance teams, including accounting, bookkeeping and financial reporting.
The Copenhagen-headquartered company told CNBC that it had raised $30 million in a Series A funding round led by Balderton Capital, an early investor in fintech unicorns Revolut and GoCardless.
Atomico, Cherry Ventures, Seedcamp and Entrée Capital also invested in the round, along with angel investors including Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf and Meta board member Charlie Songhurst.
Light plans to use the cash to “double down on the commercial side” of the business, Jonathan Sanders, Light’s CEO and co-founder, told CNBC. The startup recently opened an office in London and says it is planning to open one in New York to meet U.S. demand.
Light isn’t the only startup out there using AI to streamline companies’ finance and accounting processes.
Pigment, a business planning and forecasting platform designed to be more user-friendly than Microsoft Excel, last year raised $145 million at a valuation north of $1 billion. More recently, accounting software startup Pennylane raised 75 million euros ($88.4 million), doubling its valuation to 2 billion euros.
Currently, the market for software that helps companies manage their finances is dominated by industry behemoths like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. However, these systems can often be cumbersome, requiring specialists to “tinker around the edges for a year or two just to make it work,” according to Sanders.
“We service fast-growing, fast-scaling companies who need a system where they can expand really fast,” Sanders told CNBC. Light’s customers include Lovable, the buzzy Swedish AI firm recently valued at $2 billion, and Sana Labs, which is being acquired by Workday for $1.1 billion.
Sanders said AI can rapidly transform how companies handle their finances. “The future of numbers is text,” he says. For example, rather than sifting through company policies to find a team’s meal allowance, this can be automated by an AI agent that has access to the relevant documents.
Moving forward, Light wants to focus on large, enterprise-level customers that struggle with “broken processes and workflows,” according to Sanders. “No human team can continuously analyze, reconcile and update thousands of pages of policies for coherence,” he told CNBC.
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports1 year agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports3 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Sports3 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment12 months agoHere are the best electric bikes you can buy at every price level in October 2024