Powerstack: Clippy, Copilot, and Capex

Texas just issued one of the most significant data center moratoria of the year. Clients can read our full take here. The hyperscalers, meanwhile, had other plans: Q2 earnings calls showed capex spending climbing to ~$730bn, with no sign of a pause. This week, we look at what gives.

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This is Currence’s weekly newsletter on the moves and motives shaping the load growth era. Not a client yet?

What happened

It’s Big Tech earnings season. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta came to call. And to no one’s surprise, capex plans and spending keep climbing: every company raised guidance or held it at record levels. 

Combined, the four companies are on track to spend roughly $730bn on AI infrastructure in 2026. That’s up 77% from $410bn in 2025. Analysts are already projecting the combined figure exceeds $1T in 2027.

The playbook driving that spending is not new – companies commit high upfront early to long-lived assets like land, shells, and power, and decide on chips closer to deployment. But in Q2 several of these moves got big enough call out in earnings.

And even more to the point, Alphabet's CFO flagged "data center operations costs such as energy" as a P&L pressure alongside depreciation. This was the third time she’d used this line, and it’s become a somewhat standard CFO line, meaning that energy cost for data centers has become enough of a drag on margins that it’s worth mentioning.

Sure, $730bn is huge, but the number I keep thinking about is 30 million.

Mentioned on its call, that's the number of paid Copilot seats via Microsoft 365 as of June. That's up from 20m in April, sitting on a base of roughly 450m paid M365 commercial seats, so about 7% of the base. It's a tiny amount, for sure, but adoption is accelerating, and it's got miles and miles left to run inside an installed base that already runs most large companies on earth. People open Microsoft products to do work. That's the moat. M365 gets funded out of operating budgets that tend to get renewed, and it's pretty easy to see how Copilot will just get tacked on.

Anecdotally, we're seeing this too. We're launching the Currence MCP in the coming weeks, and nearly every client we talk to is standing up an AI strategy right now and wiring in MCPs, ours included. Some will connect via Claude, but from what we hear, most will go through Copilot.

But this is Powerstack, why on earth are we talking about Copilot users?

It's all about counterparty risk, baby! Nobody signs a 15-year PPA against a demand curve. You sign it against a credible counterparty, and that creditworthiness is what makes long-dated power contracts writable. Look back at the line above about Amazon's power book, where power providers have committed to selling the company roughly 270 million MWh at a 15-year weighted-average remaining duration, most of it delivered beyond 2035. These predate the AI boom, and that's just it – the power industry has been underwriting Amazon's balance sheet for a decade. The question now is which AI-era counterparties get the same treatment.

But here's the thing. Very little of the $730bn buys generation. Recall how energy gets mentioned in the same breath as asset depreciation, not exactly the marquee figure. Microsoft spent $41bn in the June quarter alone and roughly two-thirds went to CPUs and GPUs. So while power is critical for the hyperscalers to hit their objectives, the power capex sits on somebody else's balance sheet, and these days that's increasingly the infrastructure funds. They're the ones scrutinizing the creditworthiness of the folks across the table, and they'll be looking at adoption and renewal rates, or the staying power of M365.

We've been banging this drum for a while (here) and we'll continue to do so – that the infra funds are buying companies like AES, Copia, Intersect, Aligned and EDF NA for their queue positions and safe-harbored pipelines. And the capital keeps on coming, with MGX closing a $49bn debut fund in July that's barely deployed. Nobody can originate a queue position fast enough to energize by 2028, so buying beats building. It's the whole Fastest MW logic we laid out here. For me, the infra funds are the ones to watch on the power side of the AI trade, and the parties they contract with are more than likely the ones with the most staying power.

It looks like you're trying to underwrite a 15-year PPA. Would you like help with that? 

A quick read on the numbers shaping the market. The capex, the contracts, the regs, all anchored in the so-what.

$1bn // Base Power closed a Series D at a $13bn valuation less than a year after its last billion-dollar round. The company installs subscription home batteries, manages charge/discharge, and sells stored energy back to the grid at peak. It’s now at ~100 installs a day, targeting double that by year-end. For utilities, it's dispatchable capacity without the lead time, and it’s already deploying in Texas, but now plans an expansion into Illinois that puts it inside PJM, where data center load is already squeezing capacity margins.

$350m // Schneider Electric's acquisition of AiDASH. The satellite-based wildfire, vegetation, and climate-risk monitoring provider is a strategic bet as climate risk hits utilities, like this week’s threat of a credit downgrade for California utilities over wildfire exposure. Grid-hardening and climate-risk software are becoming a big M&A category, and full-stack digital grid OEMs (Schneider, Hitachi, GE Vernova) are well-placed to consolidate.

$11.7bn // Price tag of Dominion's 2.6GW Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project now. It’s up ~$300m from its April estimate, with completion slipping from early 2026 to end of 2027. CVOW was originally pitched at $7.8bn in 2020 and approved at $9.8bn in 2021, a ~50% cost increase since regulatory approval. Dominion cites PJM network-upgrade revisions, tariffs, and updated turbine-installation timelines.

525.5MW // PUCT approved ERCOT's first AI data center co-lo behind a wind farm, requiring the 525.5MW combined load at the Goodnight campus (260MW data center + 260MW wind) to be fully curtailable within 30 minutes. Rather than carve a project-specific exception, PUCT adopted ERCOT's reliability conditions wholesale, setting a precedent for behind-the-meter rules.

Explore more Signals on Currence here.

The policies, rulings, and company moves worth watching.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s new moratorium on data centers. He placed an indefinite pause on on all grid connected data center approvals until an audit by the Texas PUC and ERCOT was completed for each project. Our analysis shows that this could push data center developers to off-grid power or out of Texas, and delay over 20GW of grid-connected data centers in development. Clients can read more here.

Virginia SCC's order for Dominion to reassign data center transmission costs. The Virginia regulator ordered the utility to develop a new tariff assigning roughly $1.5bn in transmission costs built to serve data centers back onto those customers, cutting the impact on residential ratepayers by two-thirds in the country's largest data center market.

NRC clears Oyster Creek site for Holtec SMR development. The agency approved the nuclear developer’s plan to build four SMR-300 units at the retired Oyster Creek nuclear plant in New Jersey. It follows the brownfield nuclear playbook NextEra and Brookfield used last week at DOE's former Paducah enrichment site: repurposing formerly regulated nuclear real estate to speed permitting for new generation targeting AI load.

DOE weighs rollback of 2024 transformer efficiency rule. The Biden-era rule tightens toward amorphous-steel cores starting in 2029, and utility trade groups came out against a rollback, arguing repeal would deepen the multi-year transformer backlog already delaying data center and large-load interconnections. 

Westinghouse files confidentially for US IPO. Share count and price range are not yet set. Jointly owned by Cameco and Brookfield Renewable since a 2023 deal valuing it near $8bn, Westinghouse would be the first nuclear OEM to test public markets in the current cycle, backed by a US government strategic partnership covering at least $80bn of proposed AP1000 reactors and a $17.5bn DOE loan commitment.

The latest research, features, and data drops on the Currence platform.

The Geothermal Credible Capacity Pipeline scores the 97 announced next-gen geothermal projects across six inputs to separate real capacity from wishful thinking: only half of the 4GW announced pipeline is credible, and 39% of that sits with one developer. Read the full analysis here.

Five government tenders in Australia, the UK, and Canada awarded 10.5GW of LDES contracts in the first half of 2026 -- a 10x step-change from the 33MW annual deployments that have been the historical ceiling. We break down who won what, why lithium-ion is dominating, and where non-lithium techs go from here. Read it here.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced a moratorium on grid-connected data center approvals, but it looks more like an information request than an actual pause. Read our full breakdown of who wins, who loses, and what a real moratorium outcome could look like here.

Where the market is meeting, and where to find us

📅 Currence's Data Center Pipeline Deep Dive Webinar // Virtual, 7 August // Join our client-only webinar to hear our latest thoughts on what's coming online, what's credible, and how powering models are changing.

💡 Take our Powering AI Survey here to get a copy of our upcoming benchmarks report. Currence is collecting data center metrics from developers, utilities, equipment providers, and others. Results will be anonymized and create industry-wide benchmarks.

📅 Future Currence // New York, 21 September // Currence’s flagship New York Climate Week event brings the leading utilities, hyperscalers, developers, financiers, and innovators into one room to build a vision for how the AI buildout can create a better grid future. Attendance subject to approval.

📅 Currence Geothermal Breakfast // Houston, 22 September // We're hosting a breakfast September 22nd during Geothermal Rising's 2026 conference to dive into the state of commercialization of advanced geothermal. Register here.

Interested in diving deeper? Talk to our team and learn how the teams that finance and build the energy system use Currence to stay ahead in the energy and AI buildout, including Southern Company, Tokyo Gas, Jefferies, Galvanize, B Capital, and others.