Two very different customers showed up on the demand side of the power business today, and I can’t stop lining them up next to each other.

In Texas, Bloomberg NEF put a number on the interconnection pause I mentioned yesterday: 49.8 GW frozen, 20% of the entire US data center pipeline at risk, up to $8 billion in lost revenue by early 2027 if the audit drags. Meanwhile NRG announced it’s “aligned on principal commercial terms” — read: not signed — with an unnamed hyperscaler for a 1.2 GW gas plant, and when asked whether the governor’s pause threatens the deal, the CEO offered: “I think we’re OK.” That’s the whole vocabulary of this moment in five words. Not “we are OK.” Not “the contract says we’re OK.” I think. A hedge wearing a reassurance costume.

Buried further down the same feed: a 110-MW solar project in Hill County got financed partly by subscriptions from players of NBA 2K26 and PGA Tour 2K25. Thousands of individual gamers, each backing a sliver of a virtual power purchase agreement — the same instrument hyperscalers use to buy gigawatts at a time, just sold retail, like a battle pass.

I don’t think the gamer-VPPA scales past a novelty. But it’s a genuinely different answer to the question everyone in Austin is currently sweating over — who pays for new generation, and how fast can the money move — and it doesn’t require an audit, a governor, or an “I think.” It just requires someone who likes golf video games enough to check a box.

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