The AI power basket, name by name

On Thursday I laid out the map: AI's bottleneck has moved from chips to power, and the supply chain follows the electricity in three stages, generation, transmission, and delivery. Today I put real names on that map. If you missed Thursday, start there.

One development since then runs underneath the whole basket. In June, FERC directed every U.S. grid operator to write faster rules for connecting big new loads like data centers, and to make those loads help pay for the grid upgrades they trigger. That speeds demand that had been stuck in interconnection queues and routes more of the bill straight to the data-center buildout.

Generation is where power gets made, natural gas as the bridge that scales now and nuclear as the certain but slow answer for later. Transmission is moving that power across the grid and stepping it down, the lines, transformers, switchgear (the heavy-duty switches and breakers that route and protect power), and the hardware that holds it together. Delivery is the last stretch inside the data center, the power electronics that feed each chip, the batteries that ride through interruptions, and the cooling that keeps it alive.

I put the most weight on transmission and delivery. Generation gets the headlines but builds slowly, with timelines that run years out, so I treat it, and nuclear especially, as the long game. The gear that moves and delivers power is what's binding now, and the order books prove it.

The clearest evidence the demand has already arrived is in the order books. Vicor ($VICR), which builds the power modules that feed AI chips, recently saw its one-year backlog climb sharply to around $300 million, with bookings running at more than twice shipments, and in its latest outlook management raised full-year revenue guidance, noting it deliberately leaves out potential licensing income. Forgent Power Solutions ($FPS), which makes the electrical distribution gear that powers data centers, roughly doubled its revenue and booked record orders at its last update, and management raised guidance while pointing straight at data-center demand. When orders move like that, the demand is real and present, not projected.

My position here centers on EnerSys ($ENS), my largest holding in the basket, the storage and backup power that keeps a data center alive when the grid can't, and on Preformed Line Products ($PLPC) on the transmission side, the hardware that physically holds the grid together. Below, I walk through them in depth, the newer position I've been building in Power Integrations, the full basket by stage, the copper underneath all of it, and the long-horizon names I'd only watch.