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The Grid Sets the Pace
Data centres are trucking in gas and moving into old trading floors to find power, banks are re-labelling nuclear and the grid as green, and most of the demand in the connection queues will never be built. The AI build-out now moves at the speed of delivered megawatts.
Tectonics · Inflections · Narratives · Outliers
Tectonics
AI campuses are bringing their own power by road
The Force
In October Bloomberg reported that Oracle kept a data centre outside Salt Lake City on schedule for more than a year on gas delivered by truck while it waited for a pipeline, and is using the same approach for initial work on a campus in Shackelford County, Texas, being built for OpenAI. For its Project Jupiter campus in New Mexico, where state officials rejected the pipeline's route across state land and the rerouted line is now due in February 2027 rather than August 2026, it is considering the same, although Bloomberg reports trucked gas could likely support only initial commissioning. Oracle has sent the project's developer a force majeure notice, and on 13 October wrote to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission asking it to approve the pipeline as quickly as possible: "Time remains of the essence."
The arithmetic is unforgiving. A SemiAnalysis analyst estimates that 100 megawatts, about 4% of Jupiter's planned 2.45 gigawatts, would need dozens of truck deliveries a day, with each large trailer supplying about 40 minutes of electricity. East Daley Analytics puts trucked gas at roughly four times the price of gas from a major pipeline hub. Oracle's shares fell 5.5% on the day of the report.
Power also carries a water bill that rarely appears on the data-centre site. Meta's sustainability report shows that about 96% of its 21 billion gallons of water use in 2024 was indirect, mostly at the power plants that supply it. A 2024 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study, cited by Bloomberg, put indirect water use across US data centres at about 211 billion gallons a year.
The Consequence
The binding input for a new AI campus is no longer the order book for accelerators but the date on which firm power, and the fuel and water behind it, can be delivered to a specific plot of land. Operators that cannot wait for the grid now pay a premium to bridge the gap themselves, and that premium sits in their cost base before the first customer is billed.
Sources
Inflections
The largest US bank now counts nuclear and the grid as green
The redefinition
Nuclear and the grid enter JPMorgan's green goal
On 14 October JPMorganChase said nuclear power and grid investments can now count towards its green-finance goal, alongside electricity networks, EV charging and zero- and low-carbon power at diversified companies that also produce fossil fuels. Bloomberg reports the bank wants to become the go-to lender for grid projects.
"The definition of green has evolved over time," said Vijnan Batchu, who runs the bank's carbon transition centre. The same update moves the interim reference year for its sector emissions targets from 2030 to 2035, in line with the IEA's net-zero scenario.
The scale
$100 trillion-plus, more than half in energy and power
Also on 14 October, Raj Rao, president and chief operating officer of BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners, told the New Economy Forum in New Delhi that the infrastructure opportunity is "$100 trillion-plus" over the next 10 to 15 years, with more than half likely to go to energy and power, and about $3 trillion to $4 trillion a year coming from private investors and governments. He said nuclear could help, if projects can be delivered faster.
Pattern
From what is clean to what is firm
JPMorgan says it has financed or facilitated $1.2 trillion towards its $2.5 trillion 2030 sustainable-development target. "The name of the game around energy is completely changed," said Heather Zichal, who oversees its sustainability strategy.
Sources
Narratives
AI demand is about to overwhelm the grid
The Claim
Requests from AI data centres to connect to the grid show demand on a scale that will overwhelm US electricity supply.
The Evidence
The queues are enormous. In June ERCOT, the Texas grid operator, was tracking more than 438 gigawatts of large-load requests, nearly 90% of them from data centres. SemiAnalysis puts Texas peak demand at about 85 gigawatts and classes some 311 gigawatts of an earlier 410-gigawatt Texas queue as speculative. By September ERCOT had conditionally placed 362 large loads, about 194 gigawatts, in its first study batch and excluded about 302 gigawatts; final decisions are due in December.
Nationally, utilities hold more than 1,000 gigawatts of data-centre connection requests. Wood Mackenzie, as reported by Bloomberg in August, expects utilities to commit to only about 28% of that. Developers file in several markets at once and build where terms are best; Texas now studies large loads in batches with maturity criteria to screen them out.
Yet the projects that are real are being held up. Oracle is trucking gas because a pipeline is late, and SemiAnalysis cites grid connection lead times of seven to ten years in some metros, with some critical equipment quoted at three to five years.
Sources
Outliers
An options exchange's old trading floor becomes an AI data centre
The Connection
GI Partners and Legacy Investing bought 400 South LaSalle Street, the 300,500-square-foot former headquarters of the Chicago Board Options Exchange, in November 2025 for a reported $40 million; the sellers had paid $12 million the year before. The plan is a 33-megawatt data centre, with more than 20 megawatts ready by early 2027. The owners describe it as one of the only downtown Chicago buildings able to deliver that much new load on that timetable.
Bloomberg reports the conversion will cost $300 million to $400 million, that developers expect rents of up to four times the downtown office average, and that Legacy hopes to add another 17 megawatts if Commonwealth Edison can supply the power. The trading floors' 35-foot column-free spaces, heavy structure and dense fibre do the rest.
What Transfers
The value of an asset can sit in what is already connected to it rather than in what it was built for. A floor designed for open-outcry trading is now priced on its substation capacity and its fibre.