All Access

Pro Rata Premium

Axios Pro Rata Premium

Standard

Axios Pro Rata: Non-Premium Subscribers

Other

Climate talk is cheap

an illustration of smokestacks on a screen and a cursor clicking on the smoke

Nominal gets in gear

Three smiling men stand together in a modern open-plan office with desks, computer monitors, and overhead posters; warm wood floors, exposed brick, and large windows behind them.

AI's payday paradox

Illustration of a stethoscope tied in knots around binary numbers.

Driving the day

🚨 Deals Deals Deals!

Final number

The midterms may have given corporate America permission to talk about climate change again, but getting companies to spend money on it is another matter.

The big picture: America's biggest energy consumers are showing little interest in decarbonizing.

Catch up quick: Axios Pro reported yesterday that Democrat wins could give boardrooms political cover to reengage with climate change.

"The stigma of 'climate' has gone away," investor and former Energy Department official Jigar Shah tells Axios Pro. "The question is, are we going back to a time when Microsoft and Google and Amazon and, to some degree, Meta and Oracle were doing bold deals? Are they going to move away from natural gas?"

Case in point: Anthropic on Sunday disclosed plans to spend $3.4 billion on natural gas-fired generators to supply 1.7 gigawatts of electricity for its data centers — letting the AI giant skip a six-year wait for such equipment.

Days earlier, NTT Data announced an agreement with fuel-cell maker Bloom Energy to deploy about 900 MW of the gas-fired power source for data center campuses in the U.S. and abroad.

And Google, in related announcements this fall, committed to significant natural gas-fired generation for a planned data center campus in Wyoming. 

Between the lines: The race for AI supremacy is still a race for electricity — no matter the emissions impact. 

"You and I can talk hypotheticals all day. Is money moving or not moving?" Shah says, referring to funding for low-carbon alternatives.

Threat level: Rising community opposition to data centers could force hyperscalers to change course.

Nearly half of the 17 anti-data center ballot measures that passed in Ohio last week, for example, exempt sites smaller than 25 MW. 

"Everyone thinks these data center developers are god. And the election showed that they're not," Shah says. 

What we're watching: Google, Anthropic and Microsoft have all agreed to purchase large volumes of carbon credits to offset the emissions from their data centers.

💭 My thought bubble: A commitment to buy carbon credits is the lightest of light lifts. But it's also the kind of deal that startups in carbon removal and regenerative agriculture rely on.

1. Climate talk is cheap

Nominal, a software provider for hardware engineers, is eyeing acquisitions as it expands into the automotive industry and data centers, CEO Cameron McCord tells Axios Pro.

Driving the news: The Austin, Texas-based startup just announced a $240 million Series C round at a $3 billion valuation — a threefold jump from March.

It recently inked a deal for telemetry software startup Pull Systems and acquired AI agent builder Fid Labs in April.

Editor's note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Axios Pro: Will the company look at M&A with the new money?

McCord: "We're really excited to be continuing to expand into other sectors: automotive, energy, data centers. We'll be looking increasingly for companies that have good initial traction in those spaces."

"They've been in the sort of seven-to-eight-figure range. They've been smaller and sort of more efficient. We definitely have aspirations this year to broaden the aperture and explore larger and larger deals." 

Has Nominal received takeover interest? Who are potential suitors?

"We certainly have... There's the traditional hyperscalers. There's the AI giants in the sort of the new era, and then a lot of these more of the traditional enterprise software companies for the industrial sector. 

I'll just say we have not taken much of those conversations seriously."

2. Nominal gets in gear

Nominal co-founders Jason Hoch, Bryce Strauss and Cameron McCord. Photo: Courtesy of Nominal

The rise of clinical AI is reviving a longstanding health care reimbursement debate: Should insurers pay for services performed or outcomes delivered?

Why it matters: Medicare reimbursement could create a new revenue stream that helps AI startups justify lofty valuations. 

Context: Providers typically pay for AI tools out of their own budgets, betting on greater efficiency, lower costs and better patient outcomes.

Reimbursement for AI-enabled services could offset those expenses, making the technology easier to sell to providers.

State of play: Washington is starting to kick the reimbursement tires.

CMS' ACCESS model pays participating care organizations to manage chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension, with full payments tied to patient outcomes.

Outgoing Senate HELP chair Bill Cassidy (R-La.) floated a proposal last month for new health AI reimbursement pathways. Whether it survives his January departure from the chairmanship remains to be seen.

What they're saying: "If an AI agent is doing the same quality of work or better, why not compensate them for this type of work?" WestBridge Capital's Kamal Singh asks.

Friction point: As AI makes care cheaper and easier to deliver, the question is how to keep those efficiencies from translating into higher overall spending.

It's a familiar tension in the shift from fee-for-service to value-based care (VBC), which rewards outcomes rather than volume.

"In the same way that [AI] saved people time and created more administrative efficiency, the savings are being offset both by AI spend and the additional care we're delivering," says Flare Capital Partners' Parth Desai.

VBC arrangements could better align AI's cost-saving potential with providers' financial incentives, Desai adds.

Follow the money: VCs aren't waiting for the payment rules to catch up.

Hippocratic AI raised $126 million last year at a $3.5 billion valuation to expand its clinical AI agents.

Doctronic, which offers AI-enabled telemedicine, raised $40 million in March.

Baba, an ACCESS participant, raised $40 million last month to expand its AI-powered Medicare care platform.

What we're watching: Cassidy is soliciting stakeholder feedback on his proposed legislation through Dec. 1. 

3. AI's payday paradox

The wearable giant spent $625m on a virtual care startup.

⚕️Exclusive: Charting a truce (Will Maddox)

Charta raised $55m to bridge payor-provider billing divides.

🏡 Exclusive: Housing goes liquid (Lucinda Shen)

Index Industries raised $50m to rethink real estate investing.

🔐 Exclusive: Agent security detail (Chris Metinko)

Bay emerges with $50m to secure enterprise AI agents.

☁ Exclusive: Cloud crash landing (Natalie Breymeyer)

Dreeze secured $33m to tackle cloud app recovery headaches.

🔎 Exclusive: Disrupting diligence (Lucinda Shen)

Operand raised $31m to sharpen PE dealmaking.

📊 Exclusive: Connect the dots (Chris Metinko)

PuppyGraph raised $10m to improve enterprise AI data access.

🤏 Exclusive: Brokers think small (Ryan Lawler)

Ancep got $8.5m to unlock overlooked commercial insurance accounts.

Sequoia's internal power struggle exposes cracks in VC royalty.

AI stocks rebound as Nvidia struggles with leadership uncertainty.

Stubborn inflation is forcing the Fed to consider faster rate increases.

4. Driving the day

Animated illustration of a steering wheel that turns back and forth before turning into a clock that moves from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and then changing back.

👉 GO HERE TO CATCH UP on deals since this morning's Pro Rata, including: 

Path Robotics, a Columbus, Ohio-based manufacturing robotics developer, raised $300m in Series E funding at a $2.45b post-money valuation. Georgian led, joined by D. E. Shaw Ventures, NAVER Ventures, and insiders Addition, Drive Capital, IronArc Ventures, Tiger Global, and Yamaha Motor Ventures. Go deeper

Mubadala Capital agreed to acquire a minority interest in midmarket secondaries manager LSV Advisors. Go deeper

Zacua Ventures raised $135m for its second fund, focused on construction and infrastructure technology. Go deeper

5. 🚨 Deals Deals Deals!

— Anthropic's aggregate compute and infrastructure commitments, as revealed in its amended S-1 today. 

November 10, 2026

1. Climate talk is cheap