AI Power News 4/13/26

Big moves in the last two weeks which will have huge effects on the future of the industry

Apr 13, 2026

Meta Funds 10 Gas Plants for Its Louisiana AI Campus

Meta has agreed to finance 10 natural gas power plants totaling 7.5 gigawatts of generation capacity to support its $27 billion Hyperion data center campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana. That figure is more than a 30% increase to Louisiana’s entire current grid capacity, and it does not count the additional 2.5 GW of solar and battery storage Meta also agreed to fund. The deal, struck with utility Entergy Louisiana, also includes roughly 240 miles of new 500-kilovolt transmission lines (the high-voltage highways that carry power long distances across the grid). The original plan, approved just last year, called for three gas plants. Meta tripled it. (Bloomberg)

Meta built a regional power system and handed the operating license to Entergy. At some point the distinction between tech company and energy developer stops meaning anything, and Hyperion is past that point.

Watch whether the Louisiana Public Service Commission approves the gas units on schedule, and whether other states start asking why their utilities do not have the same arrangement.

Microsoft and Nvidia Launch AI for Nuclear Initiative

At CERAWeek in Houston on March 24, Microsoft and Nvidia announced a joint initiative to use AI tools to speed up nuclear power plant construction. The collaboration targets three specific bottlenecks: permitting, engineering design, and plant operations. AI tools will flag documentation errors, unify data across a plant’s full lifecycle, and support digital twins (virtual replicas that let engineers run tests before touching physical hardware). Early results are meaningful: nuclear startup Aalo Atomics cut its permitting timeline by 92% using Microsoft’s AI tools and estimates it saves $80 million per year as a result. (Axios)

Permitting delays are one of the biggest reasons nuclear plants take 10 to 20 years to build in the United States. If AI can compress that meaningfully, it changes the economics of every advanced reactor project in the queue.

Meta Signs 6.6 GW of Nuclear Deals to Power Its AI Supercluster

Meta signed agreements with Vistra, TerraPower, and Oklo to add 6.6 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2035, enough to power the Prometheus AI supercluster the company is building. The deals include expanding existing nuclear plant operations, funding advanced reactor development, and backing Oklo, a small modular reactor startup (SMR means a compact, factory-built nuclear reactor designed to be deployed faster and cheaper than a traditional plant). The combined scale makes Meta one of the largest corporate nuclear buyers in US history. (CNBC)

Read alongside the Louisiana gas story, Meta’s energy strategy comes into focus: gas plants to cover the next few years, nuclear contracts locked in for 2035. The company is moving faster on both fronts than most utilities move on either.

TotalEnergies Exits US Offshore Wind, Redirects $1B to Oil and Gas

The Department of the Interior announced on March 23 that TotalEnergies, the French energy major, agreed to surrender its US offshore wind leases. In exchange, the company committed to invest $1 billion, roughly the stated value of those leases, in oil, natural gas, and LNG production inside the United States. (NPR)

Offshore wind, which generates electricity from turbines built in the ocean, has faced a sustained federal effort to slow its development since early 2025. The TotalEnergies agreement is the most significant exit yet. Meanwhile, federal judges this week refused to stop construction on five other wind farms, including Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, which began delivering power to the grid on Monday. The two stories running in parallel capture where offshore wind actually stands: federally hostile at the policy level, but too far along at the project level to unwind entirely.

DOE Uses Emergency Powers to Freeze Coal Plant Retirements

The Department of Energy has now issued at least 16 emergency orders since May 2025 directing utilities to keep coal plants running past their planned closure dates, using a rarely invoked authority called Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act. The most recent orders cover more than 2 GW of coal capacity across the Midwest, Mountain West, and Pacific Northwest. (POWER Magazine)

Earthjustice filed a legal challenge to one Indiana order this month, calling it a federal override of decisions utilities made on their own timelines for sound business reasons. The DOE’s stated justification is grid reliability. The EIA (the federal agency that tracks energy data) now expects retirement delays to continue throughout 2026. For grid planners and utility engineers, the practical problem is real: generation is being kept online without a long-term plan for what replaces it. (EIA)

Xcel Energy Proposes Large-Load Tariff for Data Centers

Xcel Energy filed a proposal with Colorado regulators in early April to create a separate rate tier for customers consuming more than 50 megawatts of power at peak, a threshold that targets data centers specifically. The structure requires a $120,000 upfront deposit plus full payment for load and transmission studies before a project is approved. The goal is to stop residential customers from subsidizing the grid upgrades that large industrial users require. (Colorado Sun)

77 large-load tariffs are now pending or in place across 36 states, up from just 14 approved between 2018 and 2024. State regulators are moving faster than federal policy on this. For utility executives and rate case teams, designing a large-load structure that survives a commission challenge is the immediate problem. The whether is settled.

Crusoe Signs Two Energy Storage Deals for AI Data Center Buildout

AI data center developer Crusoe announced back-to-back storage partnerships this month. The first expands a battery microgrid deployment with Redwood Materials from 4 to 24 Crusoe Spark modular data centers. The second is a deal with Form Energy for up to 12 GWh of multi-day iron-air battery storage, with deliveries beginning in 2027. Multi-day storage is a battery technology that can discharge continuously for 100 hours or more, unlike a standard lithium-ion battery which typically runs for 4 hours. (Data Center Dynamics)

Data centers need power that never stops. Multi-day storage is one of the few technologies that can cover an extended grid outage without a diesel generator. This deal is an early signal that hyperscale operators are starting to treat long-duration storage as infrastructure, not a backup.

Big Tech Accelerates Investment in Next-Generation Nuclear

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are all now signing long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs) with nuclear developers before construction begins, giving those developers contracted revenue early enough to attract private financing. That changes the risk math that has historically made nuclear hard to fund privately. The IAEA said this month that nuclear is the only energy source that checks all five boxes AI data centers require: low-carbon, round-the-clock, high power density, grid-stable, and scalable at the speeds the industry needs. (Insurance Journal)

Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Delivers First Power Despite Federal Headwinds

Dominion Energy confirmed Monday that its Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project began delivering electricity to the grid, a significant milestone for the largest offshore wind project under active construction in the United States. The Trump administration issued a stop-work order on the project earlier this year. Federal judges declined to enforce it after Dominion showed the project was too far along to halt without serious safety and financial consequences. (NPR)

Dominion has ratepayers and bond markets committed to this project in ways that make reversal genuinely costly. The first power delivery does not end the political risk, but it does make the project harder to stop. Watch for the administration’s next move and whether Dominion faces permit challenges at the federal level as it scales up capacity.

Have fun this week,

Will

AI Power Weekly

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