The world's best green fund is up 34% by betting Japan holds the answer to AI's power crisis

BNP Paribas's Green Tigers Fund, the top-performing dark green strategy in Asia, has returned 34% year-to-date by overweighting Japanese equities it sees as central to solving AI's surging electricity demands. The $208 million fund, managed by Oscar Yang at Impax Asset Management, bets on nuclear infrastructure, industrial grid hardware, and energy efficiency businesses in Japan rather than traditional renewables. Global data center electricity consumption is on track to hit roughly 1,100 TWh in 2026, double the 460 TWh in 2024 and equivalent to Japan's entire national output, while new generation capacity lags behind demand.

BNP Paribas's Green Tigers Fund, the top-performing dark green strategy in Asia, has returned 34% year-to-date by overweighting Japanese equities it sees as central to solving AI's surging electricity demands. Oscar Yang manages a $208 million portfolio that most sustainable investors would recognize in name but not in composition. The BNP Paribas Funds Green Tigers strategy carries the EU's highest sustainability classification, which normally conjures images of solar panels and wind farms. Yang, a senior portfolio manager at Impax Asset Management who has run the fund since joining the firm in 2011, has steered most of his bets toward Japan instead: toward nuclear infrastructure, industrial grid hardware, and energy efficiency businesses that Western AI builders increasingly need but can't easily build themselves. As Bloomberg reported on July 24, that call has made Green Tigers the best-performing Article 9 fund in Asia so far this year. The thesis behind it is straightforward, even if the trade isn't obvious. Global data center electricity consumption is on track to hit roughly 1,100 TWh in 2026, which is approximately double the 460 TWh consumed in 2024 and equivalent to Japan's entire national electricity output. In the United States alone, data center energy demand is forecast to nearly double from 80 GW in 2025 to 150 GW by 2028, driven almost entirely by AI training and inference workloads. New generation capacity is coming online at only 2 to 3 GW per year while data centers are adding 5 to 7 GW of new demand annually. Nearly half of planned U.S. AI data centers for 2026 are already delayed. New York has moved to ban new hyperscale facilities outright. The grid wall is real, and the traditional green energy playbook , more solar, more wind , doesn't solve a problem that is fundamentally about dispatchable baseload power. Japan has something neither the United States nor Europe can quickly replicate: a fleet of nuclear reactors that already exist, a heavy industrial base capable of servicing them, and a government now actively accelerating their return to service. As of early 2026, 14 reactors have been restarted under post-Fukushima safety standards. In January, TEPCO restarted Unit 6 of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Station after 14 years offline, following Niigata Governor approval in November 2025. The government's target is nuclear providing 20 to 22 percent of electricity by 2030, a policy reversal driven explicitly by energy security and data center demand. Hitachi sits at the center of the investment case. The company straddles every relevant layer: modern power grids, nuclear plant engineering, and physical AI infrastructure, with partnerships in place with Google Cloud, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Intel that tie its Lumada digital platform to transformer networks, rail systems, and industrial facilities. Its earnings grew 30.3 percent over the past year. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries offers exposure through a different angle: a record order backlog of ¥10.77 trillion and surging demand for gas turbine, nuclear, and carbon capture projects. Marubeni spans from nuclear to LNG to grid infrastructure. These aren't AI hype plays. They're industrial companies with decades of operational history that happen to be positioned exactly where the energy bottleneck is most acute. Japan's government is leaning into the moment. A $1.34 billion clean power subsidy program covering up to 50 percent of capital expenditure for qualifying projects, including data centers, started in fiscal 2026. The requirement: 100 percent of electricity must come from renewable or nuclear sources. That condition alone makes Japan's nuclear-industrial complex a structural beneficiary, not a cyclical one. What this means for green investing The Green Tigers performance should prompt a harder look at how "dark green" investing has been practiced versus how it's now being tested. For years, EU Article 9 funds defaulted to the same shortlist: solar developers, wind turbine makers, EV battery suppliers. Yang's fund holds that classification and has almost nothing in common with that playbook. The 34 percent return, while markets in much of the rest of Asia have struggled, is a verdict on the approach. Frankly, the AI energy crisis is reshaping what responsible investing actually means in practice. Capital that wants to be green and wants to be useful , to actually facilitate the decarbonization of an electricity grid strained by AI demand , has to follow the problem, not the aesthetic. The problem right now is dispatchable, low-carbon baseload power. Japan has it. The U.S. and Europe are scrambling to build it. Microsoft's $1.6 billion deal to restart Three Mile Island's Unit 1 via Constellation Energy, with the 835 MW facility expected online by 2027, is the clearest American acknowledgment that the wind-and-solar answer doesn't work alone at this scale. Japan figured this out faster, and its industrial names are already booking the orders that prove it. Yang's $208 million fund is a small number against the broader green capital universe. But it's the right number to watch. It tells you where the energy transition is actually going, as opposed to where it was assumed to be going three years ago. Also read: Alphabet's $124 billion Anthropic stake reshapes how investors should read Google's earnings https://startupfortune.com/alphabets-124-billion-anthropic-stake-reshapes-how-investors-should-read-googles-earnings/ • OpenAI Presence lands and software stocks take another hit in a brutal year for SaaS https://startupfortune.com/openai-presence-lands-and-software-stocks-take-another-hit-in-a-brutal-year-for-saas/ • America's emergency oil tank is nearly empty and the timing could not be worse https://startupfortune.com/americas-emergency-oil-tank-is-nearly-empty-and-the-timing-could-not-be-worse/