THE GRID
Two Deals. $100 Billion. One Reason.
Three days ago, AES shareholders voted yes.
They agreed to sell the company. A group led by BlackRock's infrastructure arm will take AES private. The deal: about $33 billion.
Six weeks before that, NextEra made its move. It agreed to buy Dominion Energy for $67 billion. All stock. The biggest utility deal in U.S. history.
Two deals. Six weeks. Over $100 billion.
"Electricity demand is rising faster than it has in decades."
Earth's Biggest Energy Source: Near Grand Canyon
For a century, America fought wars over energy buried six thousand miles away.
The largest energy source on Earth was under our own feet the whole time - much of it beneath the desert near the Grand Canyon.
How big?
50,000 times every oil and gas reserve on the planet.
Combined.
The center of the Earth runs as hot as the sun's surface.
Tapping a sliver of it could power civilization for two million years.
The size was never the problem. The reach was - until a drilling crew hit the DOE's 2035 targets twelve years early, and costs fell 50% in 18 months.
Google signed. Gates invested. The Pentagon made it a priority.
One company has quietly built this for sixty years.
Big money isn't just spending on power anymore. It's buying whole utilities. And the target is clear: data centers.
NextEra isn't buying Dominion for its stock chart. It's buying Virginia. Dominion serves northern Virginia — "Data Center Alley." That's the densest cluster of server farms on Earth. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta all run big campuses there. About 70 GW of new data center load sits in Dominion's queue.
Dominion hit a wall. In July 2022, it said it couldn't meet data center demand. Grid gaps in Loudoun County pushed new hookups to 2025 or 2026. The backlog grew. The company couldn't build fast enough. NextEra sees that bottleneck as a gold mine. It brings scale, capital, and speed.
The combined company will serve 10 million accounts across four states with 110 GW of power. NextEra expects 9%+ yearly adjusted EPS growth through 2032 from the deal. That's not a utility number. That's a growth story.
AES tells the same story from the supply side. BlackRock wants its 11.8 GW of signed power contracts — mostly with Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Shareholders approved the sale on June 26. Going private means AES can build fast, without the quarterly earnings dance.
The old utility pitch — serve homes, pay dividends, sleep well — is dead. Data centers run 24/7, sign long deals, and pay top rates. The Financial Times pegs hyperscaler capex at $725 billion this year, up 77% from 2025. Most of that money ends up at one door: the local utility.
Over $100 billion in utility M&A in six weeks. This isn't a trend. It's a land rush — and the land is the grid.
This is where Elon Musk is housing an AI technology that Jeff Brown believes will help power the next monster IPO on Wall Street.
You see, while everyone was distracted by the SpaceX IPO…
Elon Musk quietly started backing a NEW AI startup that has been called…
"The fastest-growing business in the history of capitalism."
And Jeff will also show you how to claim a stake for as little as $50.
RESISTANCE
Data Centers Are Leaving the Grid. Your Bill Stays.
Meta didn't plug into Ohio's grid. It built its own.
Two gas-fired plants in New Albany. 400 megawatts total. $1.6 billion. Every watt goes straight from turbine to server rack. The public grid isn't part of the picture.
Meta isn't alone. About 2 GW of behind-the-meter data center power runs in the U.S. right now. By end of 2027, that could hit 13 GW — more than New York City uses at peak.
The grid was built to serve everyone. Its costs are shared. When a data center plugs in, it pays its share. When it builds its own power and walks away, the bill doesn't shrink. It just lands on the people still connected.
Why are data centers leaving? The queue is broken. A new grid hookup takes five years or more. A gas turbine takes 18 months. In the AI race, speed wins.
Roughly 90 GW of behind-the-meter power has been announced. Texas leads on plans. Ohio leads on builds — Meta and EdgeConneX both have gas plants under way near New Albany.
Data centers aren't just using the grid anymore. They're building a shadow grid — and everyone else is stuck paying for the one they left behind.
BLACKOUT WATCH
Three Blind Spots in the Grid Rush
The load you can't see. Behind-the-meter data centers operate outside the grid operator's view. ERCOT, PJM, and NYISO plan the grid based on what they can measure. Thirteen gigawatts of power they can't see or dispatch by 2027 is a reliability planning problem no model was built for. If those plants trip offline during a heat wave, the grid takes the hit.
The supply that's still years away. Rolls-Royce SMR just announced Pioneer Works — a £12 million test factory in Derby, England, opening in Q4. It's a milestone for factory-built nuclear. But the first commercial unit is mid-2030s at the earliest. The demand is here now. The clean supply isn't. SEIA projects 613 GWh of battery storage on the grid by 2030 — that helps, but it doesn't replace base-load power.
The deal math that doesn't add up. GE Vernova booked $2.4 billion in data center equipment orders in Q1 — more than all of 2025. The stock crossed $1,100 and joined the Russell Top 50. That's real demand. But every piece of equipment sold is a piece of grid that hasn't been built yet. The orders are outrunning the installations. And the gap is where blackouts live.
The money is moving faster than the grid. That's how you get a $100 billion land rush and a reliability crisis at the same time.
