• THE GRID
America Is Building Twice as Much Gas Power as China. The Reason? Data Centers.
Thirty-three million tons of CO₂ per year. That's what Amazon's new Texas gas plant is allowed to release. If built as planned, it would be the single biggest source of power-plant emissions in the country.
And it's just one project.
Global Energy Monitor dropped a report this month that stopped me cold. In the first half of 2026, the U.S. nearly doubled the gas-fired capacity it has in the works just for data centers. That figure hit 189 gigawatts. Six months ago it was roughly 100 GW.
US Gas in Development
378 GW
| 6-Month Change
+50%
|
Gas Tied to Data Centers
189 GW
| US Share of Global Plans
~1/3
|
Forget SpaceX. Elon's next BIG bet is a radical "light-speed" device that's turning AI into "Accelerated AI" – and making it 100 times faster and 100 times more energy efficient.
The mainstream hasn't caught on yet. But "Accelerated AI" stocks are breaking out as we speak: 133%, 217%, or even 320% or more… and it's just getting started.
Total U.S. gas capacity in the pipeline rose 50% — from 252 GW to 378 GW. The U.S. now has more gas power in development than any other country. More than China. More than India. Roughly a third of all planned gas capacity on Earth sits inside American borders. If all of it were built, it would rival the peak gas boom of 2002.
The names behind the rush are the ones you'd expect. Amazon is building a 7.65 GW complex in Pecos County, Texas, with developer Pacifico Energy. Chevron signed a 20-year deal with Microsoft for Project Kilby — a 2.67 GW gas plant in West Texas using GE Vernova turbines, with power flowing by 2028. And SoftBank's SB Energy is planning a campus of up to 8 GW in Ohio for OpenAI, backed by $1.5 billion from NVIDIA.
"It is nearly impossible nowadays to guess what is a pie in the sky proposal, and what has a real chance of getting built."
She's right. Turbine supply chains are jammed. Lead times stretch for years. Nearly a quarter of gas projects tied to data centers don't even have a named start year for operation. GEM itself warns that turbine constraints, financing gaps, local moratoriums, and public backlash leave the real scale of this buildout wide open.
But the direction is clear. Big Tech needs power now. The grid can't keep up. So they're building their own gas plants — and the emissions map of America is about to shift.
The companies pledging net-zero are now the ones building the biggest fossil-fuel plants in the country. Follow the gas turbine orders, not the press releases.
Forget SpaceX, this is Elon’s Next Breakthrough
While everyone was distracted with the recent SpaceX IPO…
Elon Musk quietly filed a patent with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to protect what I believe will be his next breakthrough…
Something he called “the greatest tech invention in history.”
Elon is predicting this new AI breakthrough will unleash…
A $1 quadrillion new wealth wave.
That’s more than 30 times bigger than the entire U.S. economy.
And just to give you an idea of how much wealth we're talking about...
That would be enough to send a check for $2.8 million to every single American.
Click here to see the details because I believe this invention will make a lot of people rich.
• VOLTAGE
TerraPower's Nuclear Reactor Has Something Gas Plants Can't Match
Every gas plant I just wrote about has the same flaw. It burns fuel. It emits carbon. And it locks in costs tied to natural gas prices for decades.
TerraPower is betting on a different path.
In January, Meta signed an agreement with TerraPower for up to eight Natrium reactors. The projected baseload capacity across those units sits at roughly 2.8 GW. But the Natrium has a twist. It stores heat in molten salt, then releases it on demand — pushing effective output to about 4 GW during peak hours.
That storage piece matters. A gas plant runs at one speed. The Natrium can ramp. It can bank heat during low-demand hours and release it when GPUs are running hot. For a data center operator, that means firm power without fuel risk.
TerraPower announced plans to reveal a second reactor project later this year, with a groundbreaking planned for 2027. First units could deliver power as early as 2032. The company closed a $650 million raise last year that included NVentures, NVIDIA's venture arm.
Meta is funding the deployment. NVIDIA is backing the company. Sabey Data Centers signed an MOU as well. The pipeline is growing.
Gas gets you power in two years. Nuclear gets you power for sixty. The data center owners doing the math on total cost of ownership are choosing Natrium.
• WIRED IN
Four Signals From the Grid's Money Map
NVIDIA put $1.5 billion into SB Energy on August 17, locking in land, power, and shell capacity at the PORTS-Pike campus in Ohio. The site will host up to 8 GW of AI compute for OpenAI. NVIDIA isn't just selling chips anymore — it's financing the buildings those chips sit in.
That power has to come from somewhere, and Constellation just showed where some of it will. The company signed 920 MW of new long-term nuclear PPAs in Q2. One standout: a 176 MW deal with Walmart — the retailer's first-ever nuclear agreement. Constellation raised full-year guidance to $11.50–$12.50 per share.
On the fossil side, Chevron locked in a 20-year power deal with Microsoft for Project Kilby in West Texas. The 2.67 GW gas plant will use GE Vernova turbines, with first power expected in 2028. An oil major selling electricity to a tech giant for two decades — that's a sentence I didn't expect to write this year.
And NextEra posted Q2 adjusted EPS of $1.15, up 9.5% year over year. The company added 3.6 GW of clean energy to its backlog — including 2 GW of battery storage. Total renewables backlog now sits at 35.1 GW. NextEra is stacking capacity while others are still waiting on permits.
Chip makers, oil majors, nuclear operators, and renewable builders — all chasing the same market at once. The power shortage is real. And the money knows it.
The AI Buildout Needs These 10 Stocks
You don’t have to buy OpenAI or Anthropic to invest in AI. Each large language model requires specialized technology to keep running and growing.
MarketBeat’s The Infrastructure’s Backbone: 10 Stocks Powering the AI Buildout report reveals 10 companies supplying the memory, storage, connectivity, fabrication, power, and cooling behind AI’s next phase.
