One Meta data center is pushing 10 gas plants into a Louisiana town of 20,000

Base Electron, a data center power developer, has awarded a $2.4 billion design-build contract for 1.2 gigawatts of gas-fired generation in Louisiana to support AI workloads tied to a Meta facility — and is already evaluating a matching 1.2 GW expansion. The buildout would plant up to 10 new natural gas power plants in a community of roughly 20,000 residents. The scale reflects a broader supply problem emerging beneath the national headline numbers. Data centers consumed 4.6% of US electricity in 2024. Government forecasts suggest that share could nearly triple by 2028. The Electric Power Research Institute puts 2030 demand from data centers at 9% to 17% of total US electricity supply, or as much as 790 terawatt-hours. Some analysts project nationwide electricity use rising 20% over the next decade, with AI infrastructure as the primary driver. For gas markets, the Louisiana concentration matters more than the national aggregate. An unnamed energy infrastructure investor and former gas midstream CEO has argued the data center surge is unlikely to threaten LNG export volumes given ample domestic supply — a reasonable read at Henry Hub. But regional infrastructure rarely moves at the pace of data center leasing, and a cluster of 1.2 to 2.4 GW of new baseload demand in a single MISO subregion could widen basis differentials even with national storage running 141 billion cubic feet above year-ago levels, roughly 8% higher. June NYMEX futures have been trading near $3.00 after crossing the 50-day moving average at $2.943, breaking a consolidation range that had held for weeks. The prior week's storage draw of 52 Bcf came in well below the five-year average withdrawal of 168 Bcf, keeping inventory buffers intact but doing little to tighten the strip. Equipment supplier Babcock & Wilcox secured the Base Electron contract and reported a backlog surge of 470% to $2.8 billion. The company guided 2026 core adjusted EBITDA to $70 million to $85 million, roughly 80% year-over-year growth, explicitly excluding any incremental upside from the 1.2 GW option or further awards from Base Electron's stated $12 billion global pipeline. Shares closed at $14.54, up 129% year to date. The stock carries balance sheet risk: stockholders' equity sits at negative $131.5 million and a 6.50% note refinancing comes due in 2026. The power demand surge has already strained tech sector emissions commitments. Google's emissions jumped nearly 50% since it pledged to run all operations on clean electricity by 2030 — a goal now described internally as a "moonshot." Amazon's rose 33%, Microsoft's climbed more than 23%, and Meta's surged more than 60%. Battery storage companies are seeing rising interest from AI operators but face interconnection queues measured in years and supply chains concentrated in China. Electric utilities are beginning to show the revenue impact. One large utility reported net income of $567 million for the quarter ending December 31, up from $464 million a year earlier, with electric segment revenue climbing more than 16% year-over-year. Equinor separately signed a five-year agreement to supply up to 0.5 billion cubic meters of gas annually to Dutch utility Eneco starting February 2026, part of European efforts to lock in flexible baseload supply as data center load grows on that side of the Atlantic as well. The near-term signal to watch is whether Base Electron exercises the second 1.2 GW option. If it does, the Louisiana project doubles and regional basis widening becomes more likely ahead of MISO interconnection approval timelines. Weekly storage prints will show whether data center baseload growth is starting to eat into the inventory surplus that has kept the front of the curve capped below $3.50 for most of the past year.