Energy Sector Weekly — The Most Valuable Asset in AI Isn’t Intelligence. It’s Permission. The AI boom is often described as a race for better models, faster chips and larger data centres. That framing made sense two years ago. It does not make as much sense today. The next bottleneck is no longer computing power. It is permission to consume power. Every major hyperscaler has the money to buy servers. Most can raise billions of dollars in weeks. What they cannot buy overnight is a natural gas plant, a transmission line, a pipeline expansion or a place at the front of an interconnection queue. Those assets operate on engineering timelines, not venture-capital timelines. This week’s news reinforced that shift. NRG announced a $3.2 billion agreement

Energy Sector Weekly — AI Is Flashy. Spare Capacity Is Valuable. Investors keep looking for the AI boom in the most obvious place: software, chips and cloud platforms. That is understandable. It is also incomplete. The more interesting trade may be developing in the older, less glamorous parts of the energy system: utilities with available power, pipelines that can expand gas supply, refiners that convert volatility into margins, and grids that are suddenly admitting they do not have enough slack. This week’s news made that point from three directions. Alliant Energy is turning data-centre demand into utility load growth. TC Energy approved C$700 million in natural-gas pipeline expansions as power demand keeps rising. Valero reported its strongest quarterly profit since 2022 as refining margins surged.

Energy Sector Weekly — LNG Is Becoming an Energy Security Trade The market still talks about LNG as if it is just natural gas on a boat. That is too simple. LNG is becoming one of the clearest ways to measure whether countries trust the global energy system. That is the real story behind the U.S. approval of another major LNG export project this week. On its own, the Department of Energy’s approval for Argent LNG to export from its proposed Port Fourchon, Louisiana terminal to countries with free-trade agreements is only one regulatory step. The project still needs more approvals, contracts, financing and construction before it becomes real. But timing matters. The approval came during the same week Asian LNG prices climbed to a

Energy Sector Weekly — The AI Trade Is Moving From Chips To Power Everybody is buying AI stocks. That is understandable. The money, attention and momentum have all been in models, chips and cloud platforms. But Meta’s C$13 billion Alberta data-centre announcement suggests the more interesting trade may be moving underneath the technology layer entirely. AI is no longer just a software race. It is becoming a power race, and that means the companies behind electricity, fuel, generation and grid infrastructure may be more important than the market wants to admit. The conventional view is that Meta is building a Canadian AI campus because it needs more compute. True, but incomplete. The better interpretation is that Meta is building an energy-backed industrial facility. The planned