“Is there enough capital?” I heard that question more than I expected at the data center finance conference I attended last week. When the constraint moves beyond turbines and transformers to capital itself, you know the boom is historic in scale. The consensus answer was “Yes, but…” Capital is plentiful in aggregate. What is scarce is capital willing to bear a specific risk at an acceptable price.
Every pool has limits on check size, duration and development risk. At our ~$20 million/MW shell cost, a 1 GW campus is a $20 billion financing, too large for most single pools. It gets funded in pieces, each with contracts and risks matched to the capital behind it.
In our 2Q26 Power Compass, CEG’s NAV rose 13% to $353/share on signed PPAs. VST’s fell 16% to $184/share when we stopped crediting nuclear contracts it hasn’t announced. At TeraWulf’s Chesapeake site, management guides to ~800 MW of critical IT capacity. We carry 400 MW in our NAV, a 50% build probability, because the Morgantown Power acquisition and a gas pipeline are both pending. We underwrite the way the lenders do: signed contracts get full credit, guidance gets a probability discount and unannounced deals get none.
How a campus gets power gets the same test. Our land ladder gives a parcel entering entitlement ~5% odds of energizing and values energized land at 22x raw. An edge on the odds is worth real money. Of 191.8 GW of large loads ERCOT provisionally classified in Batch Zero, only 8.8 GW is tied to stability studies targeting 2027 energization. Our updated September data center forecast has behind-the-meter projects, which energize in about 30 months versus 72 on the grid, serving ~41% of 2026 to 2030 additions. I have to wonder how much of the load growth investors credit to grid IPPs ends up served behind the meter instead. BTM swaps queue risk for permit and fuel risk.
When Oracle sent STACK Infrastructure a force majeure notice on Project Jupiter, the New Mexico Stargate campus, it preserved its ability to seek payment relief if the campus misses its 2028 target. The fuel cell microgrid still lacks an air permit, and the Green Chile gas pipeline slipped from August to February 2027. Our county sentiment scores make community risk more predictable: they run negative in every market, and opposition mostly means delay. An 18-month slip in our forecast cuts 2026 to 2030 additions from 82.8 GW to ~50.8 GW. A signed contract settles who carries a delay, and whoever carries it has to price it.
Yes, there is enough capital. The “but” is how much of it will bear each risk, and at what price.
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