日本のGX150兆円は、欧州のディープテックにとっての市場である

Japan’s GX Basic Policy commits the country to more than ¥150 trillion of public and private investment over ten years from 2023. About ¥20 trillion of that is government money, financed by GX Economy Transition Bonds, created under the GX Promotion Act of May 2023 and the first sovereign transition bonds anywhere (METI; Agency for Natural Resources and Energy). The first Climate Transition Interest Bonds were auctioned in February 2024 and raised ¥1.6 trillion across ten-year and five-year tranches.

Much of what that money has to buy — electrolysers, low-carbon iron, next-generation battery chemistry, industrial heat — is being built in Europe.

May 2021 — the Green Alliance

The EU and Japan launched a Green Alliance, the first agreement of its kind the EU signed with any partner (European Commission). Both sides committed to climate neutrality by 2050 and opened a standing bilateral channel on energy and climate policy.

June 2024 — hydrogen, at the agency level

Valerie Bouillon-Delporte, Executive Director of the EU’s Clean Hydrogen Partnership, and Saito Tamotsu, Chairman of NEDO, signed a cooperation agreement on 3 June 2024. The agreement puts the two agencies into joint research and demonstration projects, and into joint standardisation work. Electrolysis and hydrogen carriers such as ammonia are named topics (Clean Hydrogen Partnership). It was the Clean Hydrogen Partnership’s first international cooperation agreement, and it formalised fifteen years of working contact between the two organisations.

September 2025 — batteries, in Tokyo and Osaka

InnoEnergy signed a memorandum of cooperation in Tokyo with JETRO and the GX Acceleration Agency covering batteries, hydrogen and next-generation solar, aimed at mobilising capital and building supply-chain resilience. On the same trip, in Osaka, the European Battery Alliance and RECHARGE signed a memorandum of understanding with Japan’s Battery Association for Supply Chain on black-mass recycling standards and battery data-system exchange (InnoEnergy).

Black mass is the shredded output of a spent lithium-ion battery. Standardising how it is graded and traded is the kind of detail that decides whether a European recycler can sell into a Japanese battery supply chain at all.

March 2026 — the workplan

Kurt Vandenberghe, the European Commission’s Director-General for Climate Action, and Doi Kentaro, Vice-Minister for Global Environmental Affairs at Japan’s Ministry of the Environment, opened a High-Level Climate Dialogue in Brussels. The two sides agreed to run bilateral exchanges through 2026. Industrial decarbonisation and carbon capture use and storage are on that list (European Commission).

Every agreement above sits at the level of standards, data formats and training. None of them names a European supplier delivering equipment into a Japanese decarbonisation project.

The European companies exist. Sightline Climate put global climate-tech venture and growth investment at $40.5 billion in 2025, up 8% year on year, with $10.1 billion of it in Europe, while deal count fell 18% (Sightline Climate). Fewer companies raised more money each, and the ones that did are working on electrolysers, low-carbon iron and industrial heat.

A European founder first has to identify the GX programme their technology qualifies for and the agency that administers it. Then they have to find the Japanese corporate running a demonstration project that could host the equipment. Most of that is held by people rather than published, and very little of it is in English. A Japanese procurement team has the matching problem: it has to get comfortable with a supplier that has no Japanese reference customer, on a budget line with a deadline attached.

Japan financed a foreign supplier once before, in rare earths. In June 2011, JOGMEC and Sojitz put roughly ¥20 billion into Lynas, an Australian rare-earth miner, in exchange for a long-term supply relationship. The first heavy rare earths from that arrangement reached Japan in October 2025 (background). Fourteen years passed between the investment and the cargo, on a deal both governments wanted. GX has a ten-year clock on it.

Tokyo, May 2027

Tech for Impact Summit 2027 runs in Tokyo on 18–19 May 2027, under the theme One Planet, Built Across Borders. The Japan–Europe Green Corridor is our flagship Strategy Dialogue track for the year. The sessions put European suppliers in front of the Japanese buyers and agencies deciding which demonstration projects get funded, and go through how a demonstration becomes a production order.

T4IS is invitation-only. Seats are held for the people making these calls — the Japanese industrial and policy figures allocating GX capital, and the European founders and investors building what it will be spent on.

If that is your work, join the T4IS2027 waitlist at tech4impactsummit.com/apply. We will be in touch as the 2027 programme takes shape.