Venture Global Lines Up 16 Gas Power Islands for Up to 10 GW of Off-Grid Data Center Capacity

Big power is still driving big deals. 

Venture Global Inc. has signed frame agreements with GE Vernova and Baker Hughes Energy Services for up to 16 new 720-megawatt power island units and the transformer equipment to go with them, a buildout the company says could support up to 10 gigawatts of data center capacity that never draws from the public grid.

The Arlington, Va.-based company is one of the largest exporters of liquefied natural gas in the United States, with its Calcasieu Pass and Plaquemines LNG plants operating in Louisiana and a third, CP2 LNG, under development there. 

It already runs about 4.5 gigawatts of modular, gas-fired generation across six power islands ordered, under construction or operating at those sites, all of it supplying its own plants behind the meter. The new units would use combined cycle gas turbines in configurations matching that existing fleet.

“Our power generation platform is not reliant on the grid and reliably runs completely behind-the-meter making this new opportunity a natural extension of what we are experienced and proven to do safely, reliably, and at-scale,” CEO Mike Sabel said in the announcement, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Oct. 15. Sabel said the company intends to pair island-mode generation with gas supply, closed-loop water systems, thousands of acres of land and data centers to form what he called a vertically integrated AI utility.

Developers are building their own generation because the grid is not keeping up. Crusoe’s 1.2-gigawatt Stargate Abilene campus in Texas has a state air permit pending for additional on-site power, and the 900-megawatt Microsoft campus Crusoe is building next door comes with its own power plant.

 In PJM Interconnection, the largest U.S. grid, the July capacity auction for 2028-29 procured 6,831 megawatts less than its reliability requirement even at the $325 per megawatt-day price ceiling, and only 525 megawatts of new generation cleared. A PJM official told Pennsylvania lawmakers this month that the operator has entered an era of managing scarcity, and PJM has said it cannot require a data center to bring its own generation as a condition of connecting.

The turbines themselves are the next bottleneck. GE Vernova’s combined gas turbine backlog and slot reservations reached 116 gigawatts at midyear, and the company is booking reservations four to five years out. Venture Global’s agreements let it enter definitive reservation agreements with agreed pricing and delivery terms to lock in manufacturing capability over time, putting it ahead of developers still shopping for equipment. The financing side is tightening as well: the cost of insuring Oracle debt against default hit a record 288 basis points this week, and smaller players such as New Era are committing capital to power deals before they have tenants. Venture Global is approaching the same market with land, gas and a generation fleet already in place.

The company said the expansion would place no added demand on public electric or water utilities and no added cost on local consumers. 

Any third-party island-mode capacity would be separate from its LNG operations and would not affect existing LNG sales agreements, which it described as its core business for the next several decades.

Next steps are staged. Venture Global said it will file its first permit applications this week and expects to place its first power island purchase order by the end of 2026. Additional units would be ordered through future reservation agreements or purchase orders as customer commitments and other commercial arrangements are secured. Subject to those commitments and market demand, the company said it anticipates developing up to 10 gigawatts of compute capacity by the end of 2034, with sites drawn from land it already owns or controls.