Natural Gas, AI, and the Industrial Boom Nobody Wants to Talk About

A subject I feel is important to keep covering, despite the puzzling disinterest of the political and media class, is the extraordinary industrial growth that is occurring in the United States. There is effectively a massive “stimulus package” of spending going on, and best of all, it is being privately funded. For once, taxpayers are benefiting from this vast “shovel-ready” stimulus, unlike recent government stimulus spending endeavors, in which money was simply redistributed from taxpayers to favored recipients.

The industrial focus of this piece is the explosive growth in demand for natural gas turbines to produce electricity. This is heavily driven by the AI boom and the related construction frenzy of new, electricity-hungry data centers. (RELATED: Good News, Bad Reactions: The Logic of Financial Markets)

But first, it’s important to make clear that the industrial boom is not strictly related to AI and data centers. There is also massive re-shoring due to President Trump’s tariffs and America-first policies that are making the U.S. a manufacturing powerhouse again. As I pointed out in a recent Spectator piece titled, “Under the Radar of the ‘Doomcasting’ Media, There Is Massive Industrial Investment Occurring in the U.S.”

Pretty much every mass market auto manufacturer has announced major new U.S. plants.
There has been substantial year-over-year growth in trucking and rail shipments.
Companies such as Caterpillar that are involved in industrial construction are experiencing explosive growth that they can’t keep up with, resulting in a record backlog of orders.

Returning to gas turbines, the manufacturers of these highly sought electricity generators are also experiencing a record backlog, as orders are coming in much faster than they can be fulfilled. The world’s largest producer of turbines is Massachusetts-based GE Vernova, whose domestic products are made in South Carolina, with supporting plants in Schenectady, NY and other U.S. locations. Its gas turbine backlog has more than doubled in just one year’s time — from $55 million to $116 million.

Siemens Energy is another major gas turbine manufacturer. It too is seeing explosive growth for its turbines, with unit sales for the fiscal year ending Sep. 30, 2025 up approximately 94 percent from that of the prior year. Now into 2026, its backlog is at a record $76 billion. Many of Siemens’ products have been imported from Germany in recent years, but with tariffs in place, Siemens is aggressively expanding operations in the United States. As documented in a Politico piece from February, Siemens will be restarting a turbine manufacturing plant in North Carolina, and it will spend $1 billion to expand existing plants in Alabama, Texas, New York, and Florida. In addition, it’s building an all-new factory in Mississippi to produce various components. (RELATED: Reigniting the American Dream)

In the first months of his 2nd term, President Trump fired the TVA’s childishly naïve board members appointed by Joe Biden. They had sought to turn the TVA into a green energy utility powered by “renewables.” With adults now back in charge, and with rapidly growing demand for electricity, the TVA is seeking to aggressively ramp up its electricity production capacity. Burning natural gas is the cheapest and easiest way to bring new capacity on line, but with such strong demand for gas turbines, the lead time from a turbine’s order to its initial use is now at seven years, up from the historic turnaround of five years. (RELATED: Everyone Wants Affordable Energy. Nobody Wants to Cut the Ribbon.)

Much of the competition for gas turbines is from the data centers themselves. Despite the scare campaigns about data centers driving up local utility costs by soaking up a utility’s capacity, the larger ones are installing natural gas turbines to generate their own electricity. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Let’s You and Him Fight, Bernie)

Where there are manufacturers of large industrial products like gas turbines, there is necessarily a network of smaller manufacturers supplying them. Howmet Aerospace is the largest supplier of turbine blades and vanes, supplying GE Vernova, Siemens, and others. It manufactures these products at plants in Michigan, Virginia, Indiana, and Texas. It also has several other U.S. plants producing related items such as alloys and coatings. Howmet’s business is also experiencing record revenue, profit, and backlog.Howmet is just one of numerous examples.

All of this domestic industrial production has to be shipped. And shipping is seeing very strong growth too. In a Freightwaves piece from last month titled “No Holiday for Booming Rail Freight,” the weekly snapshot of rail volume was up 8.7 percent year-over-year, with intermodal trailer and container volume up 12.9 percent.

There is much more industrial activity that is part of this economic cascade. Where data centers are installing gas turbines, they must also have a backup source of electricity. That source is overwhelmingly diesel generators. As documented in a recent article titled “The Data Center Boom is a Diesel Generator Boom,”the diesel generators are often more than just a backup, as they are used to smooth over voltage changes and short-term “speed to power.”

Again, the boom in diesel generator sales has created strong sales throughout the supplier network that goes into manufacturing generators. Similarly, industrial activity in the oil patch is robust, due in part to the increased demand for natural gas and diesel.

While analyzing the stock market is not something I would attempt to do, it is setting new records, and it bemuses me that the coverage of the current bull market seems to completely ignore the impact of the massive industrial buildout that is underway in this country.

We are experiencing what will likely be looked back on as the greatest industrial expansion since World War II. It far exceeds what any government-funded stimulus package could do. Prosperous economic times lie ahead with the USA becoming an industrial powerhouse again.

READ MORE from Buck Throckmorton:

Repealing the 17th Amendment Would Save… John Cornyn

Two Roads to the Same Communism

Breaking News: Summer Is Hot