National Grid is paying $1.75 billion for a third of Joulent, a week-old company building power plants next to AI data centers

National Grid Ventures, the commercial arm of the UK utility, said Tuesday it will put $1.75 billion into Joulent for a 35% stake. Joulent is a power developer that builds generation dedicated to a single customer, and right now its customer of choice is the AI data center.

The number worth holding onto is not $1.75 billion. It is 2.67 gigawatts, the size of Joulent's first plant, and 2028, the year that plant is supposed to deliver its first power. Nothing is running yet. National Grid is buying into a company that Engine No. 1 spun out as a standalone business less than a week before the check was written.

What Joulent actually does

Start with the problem it is built around. To connect a large new load to the US grid, you file an interconnection request and then you wait. The queues run years, because the transmission system was not built for someone showing up and asking for a gigawatt. An AI campus cannot wait years, so the workaround is to stop asking the grid and build your own plant next door.

Joulent calls this "Across-the-Meter": put dedicated generation right beside the data center, wire it straight in, and skip the transmission upgrade for now. The plant is designed to connect to the grid eventually, and later phases could add solar, but the first move is a gas plant feeding one customer.

That first plant is Project Kilby, a 2.67 GW natural gas campus in Reeves County, in far West Texas. Joulent is building it with Chevron's Energy Forge subsidiary and GE Vernova, and holds a 50% stake in the project itself. The turbines are GE Vernova's, the equipment is already reserved, and the output is spoken for: a Microsoft-operated data center under a 20-year power purchase agreement. Microsoft is not buying the plant. It is buying twenty years of the electricity.

Why a utility wants in

For National Grid the appeal is boring in the way infrastructure investors like. It is a minority stake in contracted, long-dated electricity demand, sitting behind a signed offtake deal with Microsoft and partners with real balance sheets in Chevron and GE Vernova. CEO Zoe Yujnovich called it "a disciplined, partner-led investment in contracted critical infrastructure for the AI-driven large load economy," which is a long way of saying someone has already agreed to buy the power for twenty years, so the demand risk is low.

Joulent CEO Chris James, who also founded Engine No. 1, framed it around speed: the ability "to deliver reliable, large-scale power on the timelines AI infrastructure and advanced industry now requires."

The part the announcement skips

Building your own plant buys you a schedule. It does not make the risk go away. Neil Osnato of Persistence Analytics Group put it plainly to Data Center Knowledge: a signed PPA and an interconnection request do not guarantee power on time, because permitting, fuel supply, and construction can all slip. "It changes where the risk sits rather than removing it," he said. The operator stops waiting on the utility's queue and starts owning the execution risk on a power plant.

Then there is the fuel. Kilby is a 2.67 GW gas plant, which is a large amount of new combustion built so that one AI campus can run. The eventual grid connection and the future solar are real plans, but they are later phases, not what gets poured first.

The wider read is the one Osnato gave. Developers used to pick a site and then ask the utility for power. Now they pick the site where power can actually be delivered on time, and increasingly they build that power themselves. National Grid's $1.75 billion is a bet that this is how a lot of AI capacity gets energized for the rest of the decade.