• THE GRID
Three Earnings Reports. One Power Bill.
$92.3 billion. That was Microsoft's revenue for the September quarter. The number dropped Wednesday night and beat the Street by $1.54 billion.
But I barely glanced at the top line. I went straight to the capex guide.
$39.4 billion. In one quarter. For calendar 2026, Microsoft is on track to spend roughly $175 billion on capital—mostly data centers and the power they need.
Then Alphabet reported. Revenue: $127.6 billion, up 25%. Its full-year capex guide sits at $195 billion to $205 billion. And Amazon? Its Q3 print landed after the bell last night. The company has a $220 billion capex plan for 2026. Its AWS backlog stood at $496 billion as of Q2.
Add those three capex plans together. You get roughly $595 billion. From three firms. In one year.
MSFT CY26 Capex
~$175B
| GOOG FY26 Capex
$195-205B
|
AMZN 2026 Capex
~$220B
| DC Build (Aug)
$85B/yr
|
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Where does that money land? In concrete, copper, steel, and watts. The Census Bureau pegged data center construction spending at $84.95 billion on an annual basis in August. That's up 73% from a year ago.
And globally, TrendForce estimates data center power demand will reach 161 gigawatts this year. A 31% jump from 2025.
"Every gigawatt of HA gas turbines is expected to generate $500 million of high-margin services revenue over its first 20 years."
Strazik isn't talking about software. He's talking about the long tail of power revenue that sits behind every AI chip.
Wall Street is scoring this week on revenue beats and cloud growth rates. But the bigger story is the energy footprint these companies are stamping on the grid. Every dollar of capex is a watt someone has to deliver.
These aren't tech earnings. They're energy earnings dressed in hoodies.
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• VOLTAGE
The Race to Kill the Copper Transformer
On Tuesday, Enphase flipped a switch in Austin. 132 power modules. Three phases. One system. It converted 13.8 kV of utility-grade AC power into 800 volts of clean DC—exactly what an AI server rack needs.
No copper windings. No oil cooling. No two-year wait for a custom unit from an overbooked factory.
That's a solid-state transformer. And two companies are now racing to get one into a data center.
Enphase's CTO, Hans van Antwerpen, said all 132 modules shared voltage evenly and held steady through rapid load swings. Next step: testing at 34.5 kV in coming weeks. Megawatt-scale demos are planned before year-end. Customer pilots start in 2027.
Meanwhile, GE Vernova is building its own version. On Wednesday's earnings call, the company disclosed it already has a 5-megawatt indoor SST complete. A 6-megawatt outdoor model is in engineering. And a hyperscaler has notified them of an award, with contracting expected to advance in Q4.
Traditional transformers take 18 to 36 months to deliver. Factories are sold out into 2028. Data centers can't wait that long.
The transformer bottleneck won't be solved by building more factories. It'll be solved by making the old transformer obsolete.
• WIRED IN
Signals from the Grid
While everyone watched Big Tech earnings this week, I was tracking the deals underneath. Four worth your attention.
GE Vernova posted Q3 revenue of $12.6 billion, up 27%. Orders nearly doubled to $29.3 billion. The company raised its 2026 free cash flow guide to $16–$17 billion—up from $11.5–$12.5 billion just last quarter. It also announced a deal to acquire Trench Group, a maker of high-voltage grid equipment, to help fill its $46 billion electrification backlog.
Across the Atlantic, SGE SMR UK and Canada's Origin Nuclear signed a letter of intent to form a joint venture for 14 small modular reactors in Britain. The fleet would use GE Vernova's BWRX-300 design and total 4.2 gigawatts—enough to power roughly 6 million homes. Site selection is expected in the first half of 2027.
South Korea's Hyundai Engineering signed MOUs with U.S. developers NANO Nuclear Energy and ARC Clean Technology to work on fourth-generation SMRs. Hyundai brings 254 nuclear projects worth of design experience. The deals mark another step in the global push to pair nuclear with data center load.
Spain softened its data center energy rules. The revised mandate requires 60% renewable power during peak hours until 2029, then 70% in 2029, and 80% in 2032. The original proposal drew heavy pushback from Big Tech. It's a reminder that even bullish governments have to negotiate with the grid's limits.
The money is moving in one direction: toward anything that generates, transmits, or transforms a watt.
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