UK's National Grid Invests $1.75B in Joulent to Build Power Plants for Microsoft AI Data Centers

AI eats compute. Compute eats power. Now Britain's biggest grid operator has decided to generate that power itself.

Three Key Takeaways

National Grid Ventures announced on July 1 a $1.75 billion investment for a 35% stake in Joulent LLC. Joulent develops bespoke power and electrical infrastructure solutions for large-load U.S. customers. The investment sits outside National Grid's existing five-year capital plan of at least £70 billion (~$90 billion) and is funded from the group's balance sheet headroom.

The flagship project is "Kilby," a 50/50 joint venture with Chevron. Located in West Texas, Kilby is a 2.67-gigawatt gas-fired power facility that will supply dedicated electricity to a Microsoft-operated data center under a 20-year power purchase agreement. For perspective, 2.67 GW is roughly the output of two large nuclear plants — all of it feeding GPUs.

National Grid plans to connect over 10 GW of data center demand across the UK and US within five years. The partnership extends beyond capital to include National Grid's operational expertise in high-voltage networks, system integration, and large-scale infrastructure delivery.

WangDou's Take

The absurdity here is the scale: a 2.67 GW gas plant whose entire reason for existing is to power a single data center. London's peak electricity demand is about 5–6 GW. In other words, Microsoft's cluster in the West Texas desert draws roughly half as much power as England's capital city. And this isn't a stopgap — a 20-year PPA means this plant will still be burning natural gas for AI inference in 2046. Every tech company writes "net-zero by 2030" in its annual report, then signs 20-year natural gas contracts in Texas. That's not hypocrisy — that's departmental accounting.

Source: PR Newswire · Data Center Knowledge