Alphabet’s $4.75 billion acquisition of Intersect Power and Meta’s 6.6 gigawatts of nuclear agreements with Vistra, Oklo, and TerraPower aren’t just energy deals. They’re strategic moves in the AI sector, revealing a critical bottleneck: power and metal supply. As hyperscalers face grid limits and multi-year turbine lead times, the value chain is shifting towards companies that can deliver electricity quickly and the supply chains that can wire it all together.
Three dynamics now define this opportunity: gas producers monetizing stranded molecules, turbine makers controlling the schedule, and metals suppliers pricing in structural scarcity. Each operates on different timeframes and rewards different investors.
Gas producers are no longer just selling fuel; they’re selling reliability. Chevron and ExxonMobil are advancing projects targeting data centers, with Chevron partnering with Engine No. 1 and GE Vernova on a model that could reach up to 4 GW across multiple U.S. regions. ExxonMobil has 2.7+ GW in its data center power pipeline, with projects set to come online by 2027. The business model has shifted—gas is becoming a contracted service product, sold not as molecules but as schedule certainty.
Turbine makers are the new gatekeepers. GE Vernova expects to end 2025 with roughly 80 GW of gas-turbine backlog, with slot reservations stretching into 2029. Siemens Energy reported a record €138 billion order backlog at fiscal year-end 2025, with data-center-driven demand now a material contributor to gas-turbine ordering. Turbine lead times turn electricity into a time market—if you can’t get a turbine slot, you can’t build the plant. In this world, turbine makers don’t just sell equipment; they sell schedule.
Hyperscalers are vertically integrating, moving from buying power to owning generation. Alphabet’s acquisition of Intersect Power gives Google direct control over generation assets, while Meta’s nuclear push makes it one of the most significant corporate purchasers of nuclear energy in American history. The logic is defensive—ownership eliminates the queue and reduces counterparty risk.
Grid incumbents and independent power producers (IPPs) are capturing the scarcity rent. PJM’s December 2025 capacity auction produced record-high prices, with data centers accounting for 40% of the auction cost. Queue reform reveals that a significant share of “demand” was optionality, not construction plans. The Trump administration is pushing for a special auction with 15-year PPAs exclusively for data centers, aiming to support roughly $15 billion in new power plant construction.
Copper is the physical layer of AI. Data centers could add roughly 500,000 tonnes of copper demand annually by 2030, but transmission and distribution is the larger story. LME copper prices hit an all-time high in January 2026, with a 42% gain in 2025—the best annual performance since 2009. The mining challenge is not just geology; it’s time. Major new projects often take a decade or more from discovery and permitting to meaningful production.
Critical minerals are the less visible but most political bottleneck. China accounts for roughly 70% of global rare-earth mine production and around 90% of processed rare earths and permanent magnets. Beijing’s export controls create asymmetric leverage, as hyperscalers cannot quickly diversify rare earth supply chains for the magnets in every server, every turbine, every transformer.
The backlash has arrived faster than expected. Senator Bernie Sanders called for a national data center moratorium in early January 2026, and Governor Ron DeSantis has emerged as a right-wing skeptic. Carnegie Mellon research estimates data-center growth could increase wholesale electricity costs by 8% nationally by 2030 absent policy intervention. PJM itself has begun trimming load forecasts, citing stricter vetting of data center requests.
Ireland offers a preview of regulatory response—and adaptation. After a de facto moratorium on Dublin data center connections, Ireland’s Commission for Regulation of Utilities lifted restrictions in December 2025 with stringent new conditions: data centers must now provide dispatchable on-site generation matching full capacity and meet an 80% renewable requirement over a six-year glide path. The Irish model may become the template: not outright bans, but requirements that force data centers to internalize their grid impact.
Three risks could break the trade. First, efficiency outruns infrastructure. If inference becomes dramatically more efficient, demand projections collapse. Second, speculative load doesn’t show up. AEP Ohio’s queue shrinkage is a warning: some “demand” is optionality, not a construction plan. Third, politics interven