Microsoft is getting a 2.67 GW gas plant. Just for one campus.

• THE GRID

Chevron signed a 20-year power deal with Microsoft on June 22. The plan: a gas-fired power plant in West Texas. 2.67 gigawatts. Built right next to a Microsoft data center campus. One customer. One plant.

2.67 gigawatts of power — for a single campus. That is more electricity than 2 million American homes use.

The plant is called Project Kilby. It is the first project from Joulent — an energy company Engine No. 1 spent three years building in private, launched publicly the same day. GE Vernova supplies the turbines. Bechtel handles construction. Its sole purpose: power plants for Big Tech.

Nine days later, on July 1, National Grid invested $1.75 billion in Joulent for a 35% stake.

A company that launched nine days ago just raised $1.75 billion. That tells you how fast this market is moving.

The lithium boom is heating up. Thanks to growing demand, lithium stocks have doubled in price over the last year. $ALB is up 147%. $LAC is up 90%. $SQM is up 105%. While these stocks surged, the real winner could be a company you won’t find on a public exchange.

That company is EnergyX, a $1B unicorn that’s disrupting the lithium market with a patented technology recovering up to 3X more lithium than traditional methods. That’s earned them a $1B private valuation and investment from industry leaders like General Motors.

Now they’re ready to unlock commercial lithium production just as experts project demand will grow 5X by 2040. They’ve announced what could be one of the largest lithium production facilities in the U.S. and have the rights to approximately 150,000 acres of lithium-rich land. Unlike public stocks, you can still invest in EnergyX while they’re private alongside 40,000 everyday investors.

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Kilby is not a one-off. Industry analysts now track 100 gigawatts of on-site gas power plants planned for U.S. data centers. That equals 18% of all existing U.S. gas-plant capacity. Not grid additions. Private plants. Behind the meter. The power never touches a utility wire.

Why the rush? The grid is too slow. New hookups take five years or more. So Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon went around it.

Foley & Lardner's 2026 survey of data center industry leaders found energy availability is now the single biggest obstacle to new development — ahead of permitting, labor, and capital. The answer the industry settled on: build your own plant.

The deals keep stacking. Williams is building a gas plant for a Meta campus in Ohio. Caterpillar signed on to supply 2 gigawatts of gas generators for a data center campus in West Virginia. Deliveries begin late 2026. Full power by 2027. Joulent plans multi-gigawatt platforms across the country.

I have tracked the AI power story for months. This chapter is different.

Tech firms are not just buying electricity anymore. They are building their own utilities. Signing 20-year fuel contracts. Commissioning turbines. Hiring crews.

They are creating a parallel power system. A shadow grid. One that sits outside the regulated utility world.

Utilities used to be the only game in town. They held the wires, the permits, the capacity. That era is fading. When your biggest customer builds its own plant, you lose more than a sale. You lose your moat.

The biggest shift in U.S. power isn't about fuel. It's about who owns the plant. Right now, that answer is Silicon Valley.

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• VOLTAGE

I pulled up the copper chart last week. It looked like a tech stock.

In January, copper hit $14,527 per tonne on the London Metal Exchange. One of the strongest rallies in modern trading history. It has cooled since — the July 3 close was $13,298 per tonne. But that is still up roughly 47% from April 2025.

The reason is the same story I just told you. 100 gigawatts of new private gas plants. $1.4 trillion in utility capex through 2030. Goldman Sachs projects U.S. data center electricity demand alone will double — from 31 gigawatts in 2025 to 66 gigawatts by 2027.

Every one of those projects runs on copper wire.

Transformers need copper windings. Switchgear needs copper busbars. Cables, breakers, generators — copper in all of them. Inside the data center, every rack and power bus uses copper to move electrons from source to chip.

And the supply side is tight. Goldman Sachs expects copper demand to pass supply starting in 2029. Analysts at TradingKey see prices pushing toward $15,000 per tonne.

That matters for every grid stock I track. Higher copper means higher costs for substations, cables, and upgrades. That flows into utility capex — and then into rate cases and your power bill.

AI isn't just an electricity story. It's a commodity story. And copper sits right at the center of it.

Everyone watches the power stocks. Almost nobody watches the metal that makes them work.

Copper is the quiet bottleneck in the AI power boom. If it spikes again, it slows the whole build.

• WIRED IN

The builders, the generators, and the contract-holders are all in the same trade. The question is which leg of it you want to own.