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(Bloomberg) — GE Vernova Inc. has signed multiple contracts to sell natural gas turbines for data centers that will use enough power to light up major cities, the company’s top executive said.
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Big technology companies are reserving turbines — the engines at the heart of gas-fired power plants — for their planned 5-gigawatt data center campuses, GE Vernova Chief Executive Officer Scott Strazik said Wednesday. The companies aim to get some of these massive facilities up and running as early as 2028, he said.
In the last 30 days alone, GE Vernova has signed 9 gigawatts of reservations for gas turbines from customers including data center developers, Strazik said.
“That’s just scratching the surface to what’s coming,” he said in an interview at Bloomberg News headquarters in New York.
Artificial intelligence, new factories and the electrification of everything from vehicles to home heating is forecast to send power consumption soaring. That demand may be met primarily by fossil fuels, complicating major tech companies’ climate goals. In the US, electricity consumption is projected to surge by almost 16% over the next five years, according to a recent report from Grid Strategies.
While Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are all investing in nuclear, that buildout will take years and gas is seen as a key way to meet demand this decade.
Research firm CreditSights recently scaled back its projections for wind and solar growth by 2030 and more than doubled its estimates of gas demand for data center growth over that period.
Data center developers have been scouring the country for sites with enough juice to operate their big data-crunching operations. Sam Altman’s OpenAI LLC is among the tech companies promoting the need to build 5-gigawatt data centers that would help keep the US ahead in the global race to develop AI applications. Five gigawatts is typically enough to power about 3.8 million homes.
GE Vernova didn’t say which companies have inked contracts for its gas turbines, but Strazik said they included data-center developers and other power-plant developers. All the new US orders for gas turbines will be built out of GE Vernova’s South Carolina factory, said Strazik. The company expects to book 20 gigawatts of global gas orders in each of the next four years and the US will account for more than half of that, he said.
