September 16, 2025
September 16, 2025
In three short years, climate tech’s "green gold rush" era has given way to an AI-driven energy crisis. Today, we’re launching Mission North’s AI Energy & Infrastructure practice: an evolution of our Sustainability practice to meet the industry’s need for impactful storytelling around power demand, AI innovation, and clean energy. The practice will live within our Enterprise technology group, which has experienced record growth this year under EVP Erin Smith’s leadership.
To understand how we got here, let’s turn back the clock to the launch of our Sustainability practice during the “green gold rush.” The energy and technology conversation was very different: The Inflation Reduction Act had just passed with a promise to turbocharge the energy transition. Private investment in climate tech was booming. ChatGPT hadn’t yet launched to the public, and no one was talking about AI driving power demand.
Fast forward to today, and the landscape is virtually unrecognizable. Climate tech investments have slowed as the industry’s focus shifted to American energy dominance and national security. AI has created unforeseen and unprecedented energy demand. The companies creating AI, powering it, and transforming their businesses with it are all navigating a vastly different policy and regulatory environment.
Regardless of where you fit into the AI energy and infrastructure ecosystem, it's time to rethink your communications approach.
The New AI & Energy Equation
To call the business and communications challenges of this era complex would be a massive understatement. The urgent need for scalable, reliable, and clean power keeps growing – but companies rushing to build and power data centers often face a yearslong wait for energy. Meanwhile, consumers are alarmed about how AI data centers are driving up their electricity bills, and the threats and impacts of climate change remain very real.
Within this complexity is a generational business opportunity. The solutions emerging span the spectrum – from Bloom Energy's fuel cells providing reliable, lower-emissions energy for data centers today, to breakthrough technologies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems' fusion energy and Sage Geosystems' geothermal innovations that could reshape the equation within the decade. Meanwhile, companies like Crusoe, Nebius, and CoreWeave are pioneering new approaches to build and power data centers, while hyperscalers like Google Cloud invest billions in AI infrastructure.
All this innovation creates an equally significant storytelling opportunity. The companies that demystify their technologies, build trust and excitement with their audiences, and get specific about their impacts will win. These kinds of stories — complex, urgent, and transformative — demand sophisticated communications. That's the driving force behind our AI Energy & Infrastructure practice.
Integrated Storytelling From Technical Innovation to Policy Impact
For the last several years, our team’s distinct blend of enterprise technology, energy, and corporate affairs expertise has helped energy providers, AI innovators, and hardware players alike break through the noise and land their messages with the audiences that matter. In other words, our AI Energy & Infrastructure practice formalizes the work we’ve already been doing for our clients.
Key focus areas of the practice include helping companies:
- Build integrated communications that reach stakeholders — investors, policymakers, customers, media, analysts, and others — with tailored but cohesive messaging across a wide variety of channels.
- Create impactful thought leadership as audiences increasingly trust owned content direct from companies.
- Shape policy narratives and prepare for regulatory changes that will impact their businesses.
This last point is especially critical. The complexity of today's AI and energy challenges extends far beyond technology into policy and regulation, which is why our recently launched Public Affairs practice is essential. We built it to help clients navigate the regulatory and policy environment that's been disrupted by the current Administration, changing media landscape, and rapid rise of AI. The practice operates horizontally, empowering all of our clients across industries to communicate proactively with the government affairs stakeholders that matter most.
These dual capabilities of sophisticated technical storytelling plus policy navigation set our AI & Energy approach apart.
The AI and energy conversation changes fast, but the fundamentals of storytelling don’t. Ready to talk about how to break through the noise? Get in touch with us.
