Look, I get it. When someone mentions “utility stocks,” your brain probably goes straight to your grandpa’s dividend portfolio – boring, steady, about as exciting as watching paint dry. But here’s the plot twist nobody saw coming: one utility company is absolutely crushing it in the AI revolution, and it’s not who you’d expect.
Meet GE Vernova (GEV), the scrappy spinoff from the old General Electric that’s basically become the power company for the AI apocalypse. And before you roll your eyes at another “AI stock,” hear me out – this isn’t about chips or chatbots. It’s about something way more fundamental: keeping the lights on when AI tries to eat the entire electrical grid.
The Problem Nobody Talks About
Here’s what’s wild: everyone’s obsessing over which AI company will rule the world, but they’re missing the obvious bottleneck. These AI data centers are basically digital vampires, sucking up electricity like there’s no tomorrow. We’re talking about facilities that could gobble up 6.7% to 12% of all U.S. power by 2028 – that’s enough juice to power 24 million homes.
Even Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella admitted that energy, not computing power, is the real limiting factor. Translation: you can have all the fancy chips you want, but if you can’t plug them in reliably, you’re toast.
Enter the Unlikely Hero
This is where GE Vernova swoops in like the utility superhero nobody knew they needed. While everyone else is fighting over semiconductors, GEV is quietly building the infrastructure that makes everything else possible – gas turbines, wind farms, transformers, and those fancy high-voltage lines that sound boring but are actually pretty cool.
The numbers are honestly ridiculous. Their Q3 results showed organic revenue up 10% year-over-year, and get this – orders in their electrification segment literally doubled to $5.1 billion. Their backlog is sitting at $135 billion, which is basically years of guaranteed work lined up.
The best part? Those tech giants building massive AI facilities threw $400 million in orders at GEV just in Q3 alone. That’s nearly double what they did all of last year.
The Money Part (Because That’s Why We’re Here)
Here’s where it gets spicy: GEV just doubled their dividend to $0.50 per share and added $10 billion to their stock buyback program. That’s not something you do unless you’re swimming in cash and feeling pretty confident about the future.
Sure, the stock trades at a forward P/E of 50, which sounds expensive until you realize this company is positioned to ride the AI infrastructure wave for years. While everyone’s chasing the next hot AI stock, GEV is the picks-and-shovels play that actually makes sense.
The stock has already rallied 80% this year, but honestly? This feels like the beginning, not the end. When trillions of dollars are flowing into AI infrastructure, the company providing the actual power infrastructure might just be the smartest bet on the table.