Nathan Ough’s $500 billion promise came wrapped in red tape.

The Canadian businessman co-founded VoltaGrid with a simple goal: Texas energy companies couldn’t count on utility grid access.

Ough’s company would drive trucks to a job site with generators and supporting equipment then deliver power where and when it was needed.

It was a solid business for years as the Texas energy industry served as a reliable customer base for VoltaGrid.

Then, Stargate, the $500 billion data center infrastructure project came along.

The project is supposed to cement the U.S. as the dominant force in AI development. It’s a joint venture between some of the biggest tech, AI, and investment companies.

The project was met with much fanfare. On the first full day of his second term, President Donald Trump brought OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Oracle (ORCL) Chair Larry Ellison, and Masayoshi Son—CEO of $140 billion investment group SoftBank—onstage to inaugurate Stargate and highlight its urgency.

Stargate is in the realm of the largest infrastructure efforts in U.S. history, right up there with the interstate highway system.

The early sites are in Texas. And several are already in development or up and running. It’s expected to use 10 gigawatts (“GW”) of capacity once all is said and done.

Stargate, at the time of its announcement, was larger than all existing shared U.S. data centers combined.

That’s the kind of firepower the U.S. needs to remain at the top of the AI industry. But when the agencies responsible for approving new energy projects saw what was being promised, they had to tell Stargate to get in line.

This build-out is running into the exact same issues as every other energy project.

Utilities, permitting, equipment lead times, and local approvals all take time. In many regions, the grid is strained even before new data center loads arrive.

A project can have land, capital, and customers and still sit idle, waiting for a connection.

The process has slowed to a crawl. Back in 2008, it took less than two years to connect to power after filing a request. It was up to three years by 2015. And by 2023, it was five years.

If that pace holds, some of today’s projects won’t be “lights on” until 2030 or later.

Meanwhile, VoltaGrid has a solution. In Texas, its trucks and equipment were supporting the fracking industry.

Those at Stargate asked VoltaGrid to provide something called “behind the meter” power. In other words, VoltaGrid will generate electricity on-site and feed it straight into the facility.

Behind-the-meter power is a way to circumvent the long wait times that come with grid connection. In practice, it often looks like a “microgrid” built next to the data center.

Microgrids can bring a data-center campus online years earlier than a traditional interconnection, enabling AI development to start earlier rather than later.

This solution is spreading fast. Just last year, VoltaGrid hosted executives from oil majors like ExxonMobil (XOM) and ConocoPhillips (COP), senior officials from Oracle (ORCL), and engineers from data center construction companies.

Now, VoltaGrid is under contract to power one of Oracle’s data centers for $1 billion per year.

Currently, there are at least 46 behind-the-meter data centers in the U.S.

About 90% of these projects were launched in 2025 alone. And they have a combined 56 GW of planned capacity. That’s roughly 30% of the total planned capacity for these sites.

As more of these data centers pop up, companies like VoltaGrid are going to rake in cash.

AI is in the thick of an energy bottleneck. And that bottleneck is moving more power behind the grid and next to the data centers.

And the companies that can help support this behind-the-meter buildout are set to surge.

As investors catch on to this hidden corner of the market, the companies in this segment could soar as they get more customers.

This story shows that to profit in today’s market, investors don’t need to predict who’s going to win the AI arms race.

All they need to do is find the firms enabling the AI boom.

Best regards,

Joel Litman & Rob Spivey
Chief Investment Officer &
Director of Research
at Valens Research

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