Britain's National Grid, one of the oldest and most conservative names in global utilities, is placing a $1.75 billion wager that the next great constraint on artificial intelligence will not be chips or code, but electrons. On July 1, the company's commercial arm, National Grid Ventures, agreed to take a 35% stake in Joulent, a newly launched U.S. energy platform building dedicated power for AI data centers. The deal signals that the AI arms race has moved decisively out of Silicon Valley server rooms and into gas turbines, substations and 20-year power contracts.
The centerpiece of the partnership is Project Kilby, a 2.67-gigawatt gas-fired facility rising across more than 2,000 acres in Reeves County, West Texas. Developed by Joulent in a 50/50 partnership with Chevron, Kilby will be co-located with a Microsoft-operated data center and will supply it under a 20-year power purchase agreement. That is enough capacity to power roughly two million homes, funneled instead into a single hyperscale computing campus. First power is targeted for 2028, with GE Vernova turbines already secured and engineering-and-construction capacity reserved.
A utility buys into the AI boom
For National Grid, the move is a notable departure. Utilities have historically sold power to data centers; here, one is becoming a direct financial owner of the generation itself.
"Our investment in Joulent is a disciplined, partner-led investment in contracted critical infrastructure for the AI-driven large load economy," said Zoë Yujnovich, Chief Executive of National Grid. "Through National Grid Ventures, we are gaining exposure to a major source of electricity demand growth with strong partners. It extends National Grid's core strengths of investing in long-duration infrastructure with predictable cash flows and attractive risk-adjusted returns."
The framing matters. National Grid is not building speculative merchant plants and hoping demand shows up. It is buying into projects with pre-signed, decades-long contracts to blue-chip customers like Microsoft — the kind of predictable, regulated-style cash flow that utility investors prize. The $1.75 billion is incremental to National Grid's existing five-year capital program of at least £70 billion (roughly $90 billion) through 2031, and will be funded from balance-sheet headroom. A final investment decision is expected before the end of 2026.
Joulent itself is barely a month old, having launched publicly on June 22. It was founded and developed over three years by Engine No. 1 — the activist investment firm best known for winning board seats at ExxonMobil — in collaboration with GE Vernova. Its pitch is speed.
"This investment from National Grid Ventures strengthens Joulent's ability to deliver reliable, large-scale power on the timelines AI infrastructure and advanced industry now requires," said Chris James, Founder and CEO of Joulent. "We are building an independent company designed for speed, scale and execution, without shifting the cost of that growth onto local communities."
The bottleneck is power, not silicon
The Joulent deal is the clearest sign yet that electricity, not GPUs, has become the binding constraint on AI expansion. Nvidia can ship chips in weeks. Connecting a multi-gigawatt data center to the grid can take five to seven years, as interconnection queues in the U.S. swell with hundreds of gigawatts of pending projects.
Joulent's answer is what it calls an "Across-the-Meter" model: build large new generation physically co-located with the customer's load, delivering power directly at first and connecting to the wider grid over time. The approach sidesteps the interconnection logjam and, its backers argue, avoids dumping the cost of massive new demand onto ordinary ratepayers — a growing political flashpoint as electricity bills climb in regions absorbing data-center growth.
Microsoft, whose insatiable compute needs anchor Kilby, framed the arrangement as a necessary evolution.
"AI and cloud are advancing at a pace that requires closer coordination between energy and infrastructure, and we welcome National Grid Ventures' experience and capabilities in helping address this challenge and support reliable, high-performance compute at scale," said Noelle Walsh, Microsoft President of Cloud Operations and Innovation.
The reliance on natural gas is telling. For all the clean-energy pledges made by hyperscalers over the past decade, the immediacy of AI demand is pulling firm, dispatchable gas generation back to the center of the buildout. Joulent says it intends to layer in battery storage and solar over time, but the baseload that gets Kilby online in 2028 will be burning gas — a reality that is already drawing scrutiny from climate advocates even as it reassures grid operators worried about reliability.
What the money really buys
For National Grid, the stake is as much about intelligence as returns. The company says the partnership will feed insights back into its own data-center connection pipeline, where it expects to hook up more than 10 gigawatts of demand across the U.K. and U.S. over the next five years. In effect, National Grid is buying a front-row seat to how the fastest-growing category of electricity demand actually gets built — and lending Joulent its expertise in high-voltage networks, system balancing and project execution in return.
It also reflects a broader repositioning across the utility sector. From Constellation's revival of Three Mile Island for Microsoft to Chevron's pivot into behind-the-meter power, energy incumbents are racing to become financial and operational participants in the AI economy rather than passive suppliers. The winners, increasingly, are those who can deliver firm power fastest.
What to watch
Three things will determine whether National Grid's bet pays off. First, the final investment decision, due by year-end 2026 — the $1.75 billion is committed but not yet locked. Second, execution at Kilby: hitting 2.67 gigawatts by 2028 depends on turbine deliveries and construction staying on schedule in a supply-constrained market. Third, Joulent's multi-gigawatt pipeline beyond Kilby, which will reveal whether this is a one-off West Texas project or the template for a national fleet of AI power plants. If the model works, expect more utilities to follow National Grid across the meter — and more gas turbines spinning up to feed the machines.
"Our investment in Joulent is a disciplined, partner-led investment in contracted critical infrastructure for the AI-driven large load economy."— Zoe Yujnovich, Chief Executive, National Grid