GE Vernova's gas turbine order book is sold out through 2029, with new orders pushing delivery dates into 2031. CNBC reported the backlog now exceeds 110 GW, and turbine pricing has climbed roughly 300% over the past three years. Power is the binding constraint on the AI buildout, and the company that makes the turbines now sets the schedule.
The order flow is steep. GE Vernova booked $2.4 billion of data-center electrification orders in the first quarter of 2026, more than the entire prior year. Seema Mody filed from the gas turbine plant in Greenville, South Carolina, where the factory hired 200 workers last year and plans 300 more by year-end. The hiring tracks the queue: Meta, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are all reportedly lined up for turbine slots.
A turbine slot is a heat-rejection commitment in disguise. The megawatts a campus secures define the watts it must move off the racks, and the two numbers move together at high density. When operators sign for dedicated generation, they are also signing for the cooling system that rejects that load, which is why the turbine queue and the cooling queue rise in lockstep. We have written before about how data centers are turning into power and cooling plants rather than tenants on the grid.
Chevron made the point concrete. It ordered seven large GE Vernova turbines for Project Kilby, a 2.67 GW off-grid gas plant near Pecos in Reeves County, West Texas. The plant is supplemented by Solar Turbines equipment from Caterpillar, runs independently of the ERCOT grid, and targets first power in 2028, with a final investment decision expected by the end of 2026. It feeds a Microsoft AI data center under a 20-year agreement. The pattern matches a wider shift toward off-grid gas plants powering AI campuses with little scrutiny.
Microsoft committed to a closed-loop cooling system at the Texas site that it says uses less water annually than a typical fast-food restaurant. That closed loop is what lets a 2.67 GW plant sit in arid West Texas without draining the aquifer, and it is the design every high-density campus is moving toward. The tradeoff between water draw and power draw is one operators keep misreading, a theme we covered in the water-power tradeoff.
Here is the cooling implication. Sold-out turbines through 2029 set the date a high-density liquid-cooled campus can energize, which means CDU procurement, cold-plate orders, and heat-rejection capex now sit downstream of a turbine slot. The thermal design can be finished and the racks can be ready, and none of it matters until the power lands. For cooling vendors, the turbine backlog is the real forward order book, and it reads sold out to the end of the decade.