This report shows that a green capital tsunami of investments from China into cleantech around the world is speeding up decarbonisation, but Australia – with its opaque foreign investment regime – is missing out. Australia's investment hit a multi-decade low last year, forgoing its opportunity to co-invest with China in clean energy-powered onshore value-adding, including green iron.

This report tracks China’s pivot from ever larger domestically-focussed investment and deployment of energy transition technologies to a new program of historically unprecedented outbound capital flows encompassing the globe, as China’s world-leading corporates operating across every key decarbonisation sector increasingly “go global”. 

Based on the author's tabulation of investments currently proposed and confirmed, they estimate that Chinese firms have committed more than US$100bn in outbound foreign direct investment (OFDI) across at least 130 major cleantech transactions since 2023 that were tracked in this report. The technology and geographic diversity of this investment program is striking, spanning Europe, greater Asia, Africa and South America. Chinese cleantech investment initiatives into North America are being undermined by increasingly adverse China-specific rules.