Joulent's $1.75 Billion Deal: National Grid Bets on AI Data Center Power

$1.75 billion is what National Grid Ventures is paying for a 35% stake in Joulent — a power-infrastructure startup building a gas plant whose entire purpose is keeping one Microsoft AI data center running.

The deal, announced July 1, 2026, funds Project Kilby, a 2.67-gigawatt facility in West Texas built specifically to sidestep the years-long wait for standard grid interconnection, according to Yahoo Finance. Here's who's behind Joulent, what the project actually involves, and how it fits into the much larger race among AI companies to build power plants because the grid can't keep up.

The Joulent Deal: What National Grid Is Actually Buying

National Grid Ventures — the commercial investment arm of UK utility giant National Grid — agreed to invest $1.75 billion for a 35% stake in Joulent, a Houston-based power infrastructure company. National Grid's own press release on the deal, distributed via PR Newswire, and reporting from Data Center Dynamics confirm the terms. The investment gives National Grid direct exposure to the fastest-growing category of US power demand — large-load connections for AI data centers — without having to build the generation itself.

Joulent only emerged from stealth on June 22, 2026, having spent roughly a year being incubated inside Engine No. 1, the activist investment firm founded by Chris James (known for its 2021 campaign that won three board seats at ExxonMobil over climate strategy). James is Joulent's founder and CEO. Brian Boland, previously CFO at utility-scale energy developer BrightNight, left that role in early 2025 to join Joulent as CFO and head of strategy while the company was still being built out — meaning the National Grid deal closed within about five months of the company going public with its name and strategy.

Project Kilby: A Power Plant Built for One Customer

Joulent's flagship project, Kilby, is a 2.67-gigawatt gas-fired power facility in West Texas, developed in a 50/50 partnership between Joulent and Chevron's Energy Forge subsidiary, using turbines supplied by GE Vernova. The plant is being built to deliver dedicated electricity to a Microsoft-operated AI data center campus under a 20-year power purchase agreement, with first power delivery targeted for 2028.

That structure — a single power plant built to serve a single customer's data center, rather than feeding into the shared grid — is becoming the default model for new AI infrastructure. National Grid itself expects to connect more than 10 gigawatts of new demand across the UK and US over the next five years, and a meaningful share of that is this same co-located, purpose-built pattern rather than traditional utility expansion.

How Kilby Compares to Other AI Power Deals in 2026

Project Kilby's 2.67 gigawatts is modest next to the largest hyperscaler power deals of 2026: Microsoft's agreement with Brookfield Renewable Partners covers 10.5 gigawatts, and Google's parallel deal with Brookfield covers 3 gigawatts. Brookfield has also struck a separate $5 billion strategic partnership with Bloom Energy, announced in October 2025, aimed at financing and deploying on-site power infrastructure rather than buying it from the existing grid.

Sources: Data Center Dynamics, Yahoo Finance, National Grid, and industry capacity estimates cited by Enki AI's 2026 AI data center power tracking.

Why a Utility Is Investing in a Two-Year-Old Startup Instead of Building It Alone

National Grid's $1.75 billion check is a minority stake, not an acquisition — National Grid Ventures gets 35% ownership and a seat at the table on Joulent's future pipeline of projects, while Joulent keeps operating independently with Chris James and Brian Boland running it day to day. That structure is becoming common among large utilities and infrastructure investors in 2026: rather than building competing in-house teams to chase every AI data-center power opportunity, incumbents are buying minority stakes in the specialist developers who can move faster because they aren't burdened by a century-old utility's regulatory and organizational overhead.

For Joulent, the capital does two things: it funds Kilby's construction costs directly, and it gives the company a credible balance sheet to negotiate its next several projects — National Grid's backing signals to future hyperscaler customers and equipment suppliers like GE Vernova that Joulent can actually deliver at gigawatt scale, not just permit and announce. For VCs and infrastructure investors watching the category, the read-through is that strategic utility capital, not traditional venture capital, is becoming the primary funding source for AI power infrastructure — a dynamic also visible in Brookfield's direct deals with Microsoft, Google, and Bloom Energy rather than those companies raising from VC funds.

What the headline misses

A gas-fired power plant built to run an AI data center is a climate tradeoff dressed up as an infrastructure story. Engine No. 1 built its reputation pushing Exxon toward cleaner strategy, yet Joulent's flagship project runs on gas turbines, not renewables — a reminder that near-term AI power demand is being met largely with whatever generation can be permitted and built fastest, not necessarily the lowest-carbon option. One read on this: the urgency behind 2028 delivery targets is doing more to shape technology choice than any stated climate commitment is.

There's also concentration risk built into the model itself. Project Kilby exists to serve one customer's data center under one 20-year contract — if Microsoft's AI compute demand growth slows, or the specific campus Kilby feeds gets delayed or redesigned, Joulent's entire flagship asset has no obvious alternative buyer for that dedicated capacity the way a grid-connected plant would.