Fly into Abilene, Amarillo or Midland this year and you'll see the buildout before you land: cranes over half-finished turbine halls, miles of freshly trenched pipeline right-of-way, and fenced-off scrubland that a year ago grew nothing but mesquite and cotton. Texas has become the epicenter of America's AI data center boom, and unlike a lot of things AI, the money behind it is already spent, not just promised.
ERCOT, the grid operator that runs most of the state's power market, now projects electricity demand could approach 368 gigawatts by 2032, driven almost entirely by AI and data center load. Analysts have put the scale of that more bluntly: it's roughly like bolting another Houston metro area onto the grid.
The wrinkle that makes this as much a power story as a tech story: a lot of that demand isn't waiting on the grid at all. Chevron, ExxonMobil and Diamondback Energy have all announced plans to build gas-fired power plants dedicated to data centers, because ERCOT's interconnection queue can run three years or longer and nobody building a billion-dollar AI campus wants to sit in line. Nationally, data center investment is projected to hit roughly $500 billion in 2026 alone, and Texas is capturing an outsized share of it, with nearly 20 projects underway or planned in the Austin area alone.
Texas regulators know the gold-rush numbers are inflated by speculative land grabs, which is why the Public Utility Commission of Texas approved what it calls "Batch Zero," a one-time centralized review requiring developers to put down $50,000 per megawatt and prove they've actually leased or bought the land before ERCOT will study their connection request. That filter matters for stock picking, too. It's the difference between a company that's announced a partnership and one that's already moving gas or signing 20-year contracts. Here are five stocks with real, disclosed exposure to the Texas buildout, plus one name most investors have never heard of.
Vistra Corp. (NYSE: VST)
Vistra is the most direct bet on Texas power there is. The Irving-based company is the largest competitive generator in the state, running roughly 44 gigawatts of natural gas, nuclear, coal, solar and battery capacity, and close to a third of every electron consumed by Texas retail customers passes through its books at some point.
What's working: Vistra has spent the past year converting fleet capacity into long-term contracts instead of leaving it exposed to the volatile ERCOT spot market. It signed 20-year power purchase agreements with Meta for more than 2,600 megawatts of nuclear output, reached a separate 20-year, 1,200-megawatt nuclear supply deal tied to its Comanche Peak plant near Fort Worth, and closed a $4.7 billion acquisition of Cogentrix's gas fleet, adding 5.5 gigawatts of dispatchable capacity in constrained markets outside Texas. Management says it's in active talks with data center developers at multiple sites across the portfolio.
The fundamentals underneath the story aren't just talk, either. Vistra's first-quarter 2026 results beat estimates, with adjusted EBITDA up 20% year over year to nearly $1.5 billion. What's not working as well: the stock already knows most of the headline story. Shares ran from the low $100s to an all-time high near $220 before pulling back into the $150s, and Vistra has said most of 2026 and a good chunk of 2027 and 2028 are already hedged. That means the earnings upside from tighter power markets doesn't fully show up in the numbers for another year or two. This is a bet on 2027-2028, not next quarter.
NRG Energy (NYSE: NRG)
NRG's version of the story is less about the fleet it already owns and more about what it just bought. In January, NRG closed a $12 billion acquisition of LS Power's generation portfolio, doubling its capacity to about 25 gigawatts and giving the Houston-based retailer and generator the scale to chase hyperscaler contracts directly. CEO Larry Coben has framed it as part of a "bring your own power" strategy aimed squarely at data centers.
The company has already signed a 295-megawatt supply deal to power two Texas data centers, with an option to expand to 1 gigawatt, and it's partnered with GE Vernova and construction firm TIC on a plan to develop up to 5.4 gigawatts of new gas generation across ERCOT and PJM. NRG has raised its 2026 core profit guidance to a range of $3.93 billion to $4.18 billion, citing the LS Power deal and stronger power demand.
NRG has also lined up cheap financing to build new plants outright, securing a $562 million low-interest loan from the Texas Public Utility Commission to help fund its 689-megawatt Cedar Bayou plant, which is expected online by 2028.
The catch is integration risk. Doubling a generation fleet through acquisition inside of a year is not simple, and NRG's stock has been noticeably choppier than Vistra's, sliding from an all-time high above $189 in February to the $140s by summer as investors weighed the deal's added debt against softer near-term Texas power pricing.
Energy Transfer LP (NYSE: ET)
Not every winner in this story generates electricity. Some just move the gas that fuels it. Energy Transfer began flowing natural gas to Oracle's data center campus near Abilene in January, the first of agreements to supply up to 900 million cubic feet a day across three Oracle sites. It's also the gas supplier behind CloudBurst's planned 1.2-gigawatt, behind-the-meter data center in San Marcos, and in October it signed on to fuel roughly 2 gigawatts of onsite generation at Fermi America's HyperGrid campus outside Amarillo.
Add it up and Energy Transfer says it's inked agreements for more than 6 billion cubic feet a day in new demand-pool volumes over the past year alone, spanning data centers, utilities and power plants across its footprint, not just in Texas.
The pitch here is different from Vistra or NRG: Energy Transfer doesn't need to build a single new power plant to profit from this trend. It just needs data center developers to keep choosing gas over waiting years for a grid connection, and with more than 105,000 miles of pipeline already crisscrossing the state, it's positioned to serve nearly any site that breaks ground. The stock also pays a real dividend, yielding around 7%, which none of the other names on this list can match.
The tradeoff: Energy Transfer is a master limited partnership, which means K-1 tax paperwork instead of a standard 1099, worth knowing before buying. And its data center business, while growing fast, is still a small slice of a company that moves oil, natural gas liquids and refined products across 44 states. This is a diversified midstream giant with a data center kicker, not a pure play on the trend.
CenterPoint Energy (NYSE: CNP)
CenterPoint is the boring one, and in this group that's a feature. The Houston-based utility doesn't generate merchant power or take commodity risk. It just builds and operates the wires, and Houston's data center pipeline has forced it to build a lot more of them. The company now has 12.2 gigawatts of "firmly committed" new industrial load in its Houston territory, up 63% from just one quarter earlier, and expects to energize 8 gigawatts of data center load by 2029, a timeline that's been pulled forward twice in the past year.
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To pay for it, CenterPoint is running a $65.5 billion, 10-year capital plan funded through regulated rate base growth rather than merchant risk, which is why Wall Street tends to treat it more like a bond proxy than a growth stock. Analyst price targets cluster in the high $30s to high $40s, with steady 7% to 9% annual earnings growth projected through the rest of the decade.
The risk isn't the demand, which looks about as real as it gets. It's regulatory lag and hurricane exposure that come standard with owning transmission lines in a coastal city. Texas regulators already trimmed and approved a separate $2.7 billion system resiliency plan for CenterPoint last year, a reminder that storm recovery costs and rate-case fights are a permanent part of owning this stock, layered on top of the plain execution risk of building tens of billions of dollars worth of substations and lines on schedule.
Fermi Inc. (NASDAQ: FRMI)
Here's the one most investors haven't looked at. Fermi is a nine-month-old, pre-revenue company co-founded by former Texas Governor and U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, built around a single idea: construct an 11-gigawatt, grid-independent power and data center campus outside Amarillo called HyperGrid, combining onsite natural gas, nuclear, wind and solar. If it gets built as planned, it would be one of the largest data center complexes on Earth, and the company is already talking about scaling the site to 17 gigawatts by 2038.
Fermi went public on Nasdaq in October at $21 a share, raising roughly $785 million, and has already locked in supply deals, including with Energy Transfer for gas to its first phase of generation. Shares spiked to nearly $37 shortly after the IPO on a research note suggesting OpenAI could be evaluating capacity at the site, an unconfirmed report, then crashed to a low of $4.47 in April as investors reckoned with the fact that the company has no revenue, has never operated a power plant, and is trying to build gas turbines, nuclear reactors and hyperscale data halls simultaneously on an aggressive timeline. The stock has since recovered to around $9.
This is not a stock for anyone who needs to sleep at night. It's close to a binary bet: either Fermi lands the anchor tenants and executes on a genuinely unprecedented construction schedule, or it doesn't and the equity gets rerated hard. But for readers who wanted a name that isn't already priced for perfection, this is the one.
None of this is a sure thing. ERCOT itself has warned that the AI power boom may not fully materialize if speculative projects don't convert to real construction, and rural Texas communities from San Marcos to Hays County have already blocked or delayed projects over water and land use. The money behind this trend is real, but so is the pushback. Investors chasing it should expect both.
By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com
