40% of New Data Centers Are Skipping the Grid Entirely.

• THE GRID

A company you've never heard of raised $2 billion in growth financing last quarter.

Solaris Energy Infrastructure. Houston. NYSE: SEI. It filed Q2 results on Tuesday.

Revenue: $219 million. Up 47% from a year ago. Adjusted EBITDA: $108 million. Up 30% in just three months.

What Solaris sells is simple. It builds power plants for data centers. Not for the grid. Not for a utility.

For one customer at a time. It ships gas turbines, batteries, and energy systems straight to the site. Then it runs them.

Last quarter, 950 megawatts of Solaris capacity earned revenue. That's roughly a nuclear reactor's worth of power.

An expansion of an existing contract: a 660-megawatt power plant with on-site batteries and energy management systems designed to manage AI workloads. The deal runs up to 18 years.

That kind of growth doesn't come from nowhere."Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUCT and ERCOT, and by state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid. Simply put, Texans must come first."

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Mulvihill says what matters to tech firms isn't how fast they build. It's how fast they get power. The grid can't deliver it. So they're buying their own.

Enverus put a number on this shift last month. They project 62 gigawatts of new data center capacity through 2030. About 40% of it will bypass the grid entirely.

Backed by roughly $5 trillion in hyperscaler capex. RBC Capital Markets pegs total announced behind-the-meter gas at 101 gigawatts.

This isn't a rounding error. It's a new energy market being built from scratch.

Those behind-the-meter projects will burn about 1.3 billion cubic feet of gas per day by 2030. That's a full shale basin's output — routed straight to servers.

More than 80% of new data center capacity will cluster in PJM, ERCOT, MISO, and WECC regions. Grid queues there stretch five years or more. For a company like Amazon or Google, that wait costs billions in lost AI revenue.

Solaris is riding the wave hard. Its $1.3 billion bond deal was its first ever. It added a $650 million credit line.

It bought GESA, a power plant services firm. And it took an equity stake in Deployable Energy, a small modular reactor startup.

Gas now. Nuclear later. The same path the broader market is carving.

Three of its contracts expanded this quarter. Together, they should add over $100 million a year in new Adjusted EBITDA. That's the kind of growth most utilities only dream about.

A shadow power system is rising alongside the old grid. The companies building it are growing faster than the utilities they bypass.

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• VOLTAGE

Solaris didn't just build gas plants last quarter. It bought a piece of the nuclear future.

The company took an equity stake in Deployable Energy, a small modular reactor developer. A gas plant builder buying into nuclear sounds odd. It makes perfect sense.

Data centers need power now. Gas delivers in months. Nuclear takes years.

So you build gas first. Then swap in reactors when they're ready.

Solaris's expanded contract shows how this works. The 660-megawatt facility pairs gas turbines with batteries and energy management systems designed to manage AI workloads.

It's a microgrid. Self-contained. Grid-optional.

The scale of "gas first" is huge. RBC Capital Markets puts total announced behind-the-meter gas at 101 gigawatts across the U.S.

Companies like Solaris and VoltaGrid are shipping turbines straight to sites. Some are running within weeks.

That speed matters. A hyperscaler waiting five years for a grid hookup loses billions in AI revenue. A gas turbine that shows up in 90 days doesn't.

But gas carries a cost beyond the fuel bill. The Environmental Integrity Project says 74 planned off-grid gas plants could emit 662 million tons of greenhouse gases per year. That rivals Australia's entire carbon footprint.

Legal fights are forming. Three groups — the Sierra Club, Public Citizen, and the Environmental Integrity Project — filed notice to sue on July 22. Their targets: Vantage Data Centers and VoltaGrid, over two gas-fired projects near San Antonio built under minor-source air permits.

Hyperscalers feel the tension. Amazon and Google have both seen emissions spike despite their net-zero targets. Gas buys them time. Nuclear is the long-term bet.

The data center power story isn't one chapter. It's three — gas, nuclear, then grid backup — and each one is bigger than the last.

• WIRED IN