Storied General Electric doubled down on fossil fuels in the power sector a decade ago with its largest industrial acquisition ever, paying almost $11 billion for the French conglomerate Alstom’s electric business to dramatically grow GE Power.
GE made the purchase just months before the oil and gas sector crashed and the renewable energy sector began to take off. The deal was dubbed a boondoggle and the latest misstep in GE’s many struggles.
Even when GE decided to split into three parts in 2021, including spinning off its power and renewables business, the focus was on clean energy. The name GE Vernova loosely translates to “new green,” meant to reflect a new and innovative low-carbon era.
But the funny thing is that green company holds GE’s massive gas-turbine manufacturing business. And, thus, the once ill-fated GE Power division has hit it big.
After years of seemingly poor timing, GE Vernova struck the zeitgeist when it finally launched as a publicly traded standalone in April 2024. Since then, GE Vernova’s shares have surged nearly 250%, including a massive 65% spike just since the beginning of April to new highs, up to a market cap of about $125 billion.
Just a few years ago, electricity demand was essentially flat, so two factors dominated investment concerns in the mature power generation business: cost and climate impact, giving wind and solar potential advantages. Now, the world is suddenly changed with new data centers for artificial intelligence spurring the fastest growth in power demand in decades. The demand for gas turbines for power plants is booming and they cannot be built quickly enough.
“One of the pinnacle technologies underlying the modern world is the high-temperature, high-efficiency gas turbine, and only a few companies on Earth can make the highest efficiency turbines,” said Mark Nelson, the managing director of the consultancy Radiant Energy Group. “GE Vernova is one of the few.”
The company’s combined backlog of orders for new gas turbines and maintenance services for its existing customers now totals $123 billion.
Hot numbers
GE Vernova reported first-quarter earnings of 91 cents per share from sales of $8 billion, easily beating Wall Street analysts’ estimates of 45 cents on $7.6 billion. Highlighting the dramatic speed of its growth, GE Vernova posted a loss of $106 million, or 47 cents per share, at this point last year.
“Sitting here today, ’26 and ’27 are largely sold out, we are approaching filling out ’28, and starting to sign agreements for later years,” GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik said on last month’s earnings call. “I give that context to just frame that I continue to see this market normalizing to a higher-for-longer gas market. The world needs more dispatchable power generation to support economic growth and national security.”
GE Vernova declined Fortune’s request to interview Strazik, but said: “We are just getting started, and the best is yet to come.”
Notably, the company said its backlog of orders for turbines and maintenance service grew by nearly $4.5 billion in three months.
“Rising electricity demand is good for anybody who produces power generation equipment, and GE is a leader both on the natural gas turbine side and also on the wind side,” said Brett Castelli, an equity analyst for the research firm Morningstar.
Power demand looks set to grow for decades to come as the country transitions to using more and more electricity for manufacturing, vehicles, heating and cooling, he said.
“While electric vehicles are a 20-year thing, the biggest thing in the next five years is all these AI data centers,” Castelli said. “That’s why the stock has become so data center-centric.”
Tech advantages
The company’s signature 7F heavy-duty gas turbine takes just 11 minutes to reach full capacity. The machine—essentially a giant jet engine—is designed with specially-cast blades made with single-crystal alloys and precisely punctured holes that allow turbines to reach temperatures that would typically melt metal, harnessing huge amounts of energy.
Unlike the wind turbines from GE Vernova’s weaker-performing renewables arm, the gas turbines take up relatively tiny amounts of land and can run virtually anytime regardless of the weather. And while GE Vernova is pinning hopes on building next-generation nuclear reactors in large numbers in the 2030s, gas power plants are constructed now in just a few years—still not quickly enough for demand forecasts.
Just last week, and in conjunction with President Trump’s Middle East visit, GE Vernova announced power generation and grid initiatives in Saudi Arabia worth up to $14.2 billion, primarily focused on gas-fired power.
But those nuclear dreams show sparks as well.
Earlier in May, Canadian regulators gave the company the green light to start construction of its first small modular reactors—essentially a smaller, modernized version of the large-scale boiling water reactors it once built in Japan and the United States—with Ontario’s state power company. In the U.S., the Tennessee Valley Authority this week submitted the application to build the first American project using GE Vernova’s BWRX-300 reactors.
While Trump has sought to block new wind projects in federal waters and on public lands, Strazik says his company’s two turbine divisions go hand-in-hand, with the gas turbines providing critical backup to wind turbines when the air is calm.
“Ultimately, gas is the force multiplier for more wind and solar to get built,” he said in an appearance on Jim Cramer’s CNBC show last month. “Without gas, you can’t get to renewable penetration rates that the world is looking for.”
This broader movement to build power generation—gas and renewables—is now defined by the same forces that underpinned the U.S. economy after the Second World War, including national security, Strazik said in the earnings call.
“To put today’s investment super cycle into perspective in terms of energy needs and decarbonization, the scale of load growth we’re seeing in North America is the most significant since the post-World War II industrial build-out,” he said.
“But, unlike then, the growth is global.”
