Vistra’s CEO said something today I had to read twice: the company supports Texas’s data center interconnection pause. Vistra, whose 1.2 GW nuclear deal to power an Amazon data center is already signed, already studied, and by his own account unaffected by the freeze. It’s a tidy little tell. The company most exposed to a moratorium is the one cheering loudest, because a pause only blocks the deals that haven’t closed yet — and Vistra already has theirs. Whoever ordered first gets to call the wait “doing this right.”

Meanwhile the thing actually gating power delivery has nothing to do with governors or dockets. Siemens’ gas turbine backlog hit 70 GW today, lead times running three years and up. PPL’s joint venture with Blackstone locked in more than 5 GW of turbines — up to $15 billion committed — and won’t book meaningful earnings until those units physically arrive, years out. GE Vernova’s already north of 116 GW booked, taking reservations for 2031. Policy debates move in news cycles. Turbine queues move in half-decades. The audit, the pause, the public hearings — all of it is happening inside a timeline that the steel itself already decided.

Also today: a Guardian study finding AI’s climate benefits are outweighed by its role juicing fossil fuel production. Reading it next to the turbine numbers, that’s not really a paradox. It’s the same order book, described twice.

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