The artificial intelligence boom has a power problem, and Wall Street is betting billions on companies that promise to solve it. At least 10 power infrastructure and clean technology companies have gone public so far this year, raising upwards of $11.6 billion, the most on record for the sector. Geothermal firm Fervo Energy Co. soared 35% on its first day of trading after raising $1.89 billion in May, even though its technology hasn't reached commercial scale. Cash-rich firms like Meta Platforms, Amazon.com and Microsoft have juiced the rush to list, with data centers in the US expected to need more than 77 gigawatts of capacity in 2030, up from 41 gigawatts in 2025. The enthusiasm comes with risks, as wild swings in SpaceX stock after its historic debut warn of the perils investors face when they make bets on high-risk, high-reward clean energy.
Nvidia, Google and Emerald AI Launch AI Energy Management Alliance
Nvidia, Google and Emerald AI have launched the AI Energy Management Alliance, or AEMA, a coalition that dynamically manages the electricity use of data centers in response to grid conditions. Emerald AI founder and CEO Varun Sivaram said the alliance's founding members are joined by a cohort of 20 launch partners, including the AI lab Anthropic, the semiconductor firm Analog Devices, and the energy companies AES, NRG, Constellation, RWE and National Grid. Sivaram said Emerald AI, which was founded under two years ago, is building with Nvidia and Digital Realty the world's first from-the-ground-up power-flexible AI data center, a 100 megawatt facility in Manassas, Virginia, that comes online later this year. He said Google, one of the founding members, has already done a gigawatt of demand response for its data centers, while Emerald and Nvidia have completed six demonstrations around the world, in London, Phoenix and Virginia. Sivaram said the alliance is talking to the FERC commissioners, state regulators and the administration about a grand bargain in which flexible AI data centers act as good citizens to grids and communities in return for faster and larger connections to the power grid.
Goldman Sachs Says Big Tech Valuation Premium Is Fading
Goldman Sachs Research says the forward price-to-earnings multiples of the largest S&P 500 companies have fallen sharply and are now converging toward the valuation of the other 495 stocks in the index, eroding a valuation premium mega-cap technology names have held for years. The firm points to two pressures behind the de-rating: a higher cost of capital and dramatically greater capital intensity. Microsoft, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Alphabet are committing enormous sums to artificial-intelligence infrastructure, including data centers, chips and power capacity, investments that may support future growth but consume cash today, while higher borrowing costs reduce the present value investors assign to future earnings and cash flows. Goldman's takeaway is that mega-cap tech is no longer priced as dramatically different from the rest of the market, leaving those companies to prove their growth deserves a premium, and investors should focus less on headline AI spending and more on the returns generated from it.
Amazon AWS Revenue Hits $42.23B, Up 37% in Fastest Growth in 18 Quarters
Amazon Web Services posted $42.23 billion in revenue, growing 37% year over year, the segment's fastest growth in 18 quarters, with a 39.4% operating margin and a $496 billion contracted backlog. Amazon's chips and AI businesses each eclipsed run rates of more than $25 billion in the second quarter, both growing at triple-digit percentages year over year, while 98% of Amazon's top 1,000 EC2 customers use Graviton and Anthropic and OpenAI have made multi-year, multi-gigawatt commitments to Trainium. Q2 operating income landed at $27.46 billion, up 43.2% year over year, and advertising is a $70 billion-plus trailing-twelve-month business growing 26%. Capex reached $54.21 billion in a single quarter, up 68.4% year over year, and free cash flow swung to negative $7.6 billion on a trailing-twelve-month basis, though most AI capacity is contracted for at least five-year terms. Since Amazon reported Q2 on July 30, 2026, AMZN moved from $230.08 to $251.19, while SPY went from $747.03 to $762.70 and QQQ went from $687.99 to $716.92. Andy Jassy said AWS could become a few hundred billion dollar revenue business and now believes it will be at least double that and very possibly a trillion dollar annual revenue business in time.
Amazon.com Inc
Meta Platforms Inc.
Microsoft Corporation
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Class A Common Stock
Constellation Energy Corp
Forgent Power Solutions, Inc.
Fervo Energy Company Class A common stock
ESS Tech Inc
Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc
Toronto Dominion Bank