Declining electric vehicle sales caused US clean investment to experience its largest quarterly drop in nearly a decade, part of a larger pullback caused by the elimination of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits. Total investment — including in clean tech manufacturing facilities and retail spending on things like EVs and solar panels — reached a record annual high of $277 billion in 2025, according to the latest data from the Clean Investment Monitor, a joint project of MIT and the Rhodium Group. But that sum masks a sharp drop in the fourth quarter, which Hannah Hess, Rhodium’s associate director of climate and energy, attributed primarily to plunging EV sales.
Manufacturing also took a major hit: Since the group started tracking this data in 2018, $29 billion in announced manufacturing investments have been cancelled, and 79% of those cancellations happened in 2025 — erasing 18,000 potential jobs. In the fourth quarter alone, $8 billion in projects were scrapped, compared to just $3 billion worth of new project announcements. “That means the pipeline of new investment is shrinking,” Hess said. “Usually, even when we see quarterly fluctuations, from a zoomed-out view we continue to see sustained momentum. That’s no longer true.”
