Best Power & Electricity Stocks for 2026

AI's electricity appetite is unlike anything the grid was built to handle. U.S. data centers consumed 183 TWh in 2024 — over 4% of the country's total electricity — and demand is forecast to nearly double, reaching 150 GW by 2028. The largest hyperscale AI campuses already draw over 650 MW each, equivalent to a mid-sized power plant running continuously. Finding, contracting, and delivering that power has become one of the hardest constraints in AI infrastructure.

The grid cannot keep up. The U.S. interconnection queue has swelled to 2,600 GW of pending projects with average wait times of five years — forcing hyperscalers to bypass the traditional utility model. Nuclear has emerged as the favored baseload solution: Microsoft signed a 20-year deal to restart Three Mile Island (835 MW), Google contracted a fleet of small modular reactors, and Amazon committed over $20 billion to convert a nuclear campus to AI use. Big Tech has publicly contracted over 13 GW of new nuclear capacity. Unable to wait for grid connections, gas turbine operators are filling the gap — OpenAI and Oracle placed the largest-ever onsite gas generation order, a 2.3 GW plant in Texas, in 2025 alone.

The conventional electrical supply chain is breaking under this surge. Power transformers face a 30% supply shortfall, with lead times stretched to 128–144 weeks and costs up 77% since 2019. Grid equipment makers, independent power producers with contracted capacity, nuclear operators, and smart-grid software providers are all positioned as structural beneficiaries of an energy buildout measured in decades, not years.