The AI Bottleneck Is Not Chips Anymore and 3 Pipeline Stocks Are Cashing In

The bottleneck in artificial intelligence stopped being chips a while ago. It is electricity, and the companies closing that gap fastest are not the ones getting the most airtime. Nuclear and geothermal own the headlines. Natural gas owns the contracts. That is the case Dylan Jovine, founder of Behind the Markets, shared. While the market debates what will power the grid in 2035, natural gas midstream operators are already trenching pipe, parking turbines along data center fence lines and signing 10- and 20-year supply deals with the best-capitalized customers on earth. As Jovine put it, every tech revolution is at its core an energy revolution. Three names anchor his list: Williams Companies NYSE: WMB, Enterprise Products Partners NYSE: EPD and Energy Transfer NYSE: ET.

When Meta Platforms NASDAQ: META needed power in central Ohio, the interconnection queue offered a multiyear wait. Meta went around it. Williams is building the Socrates North and South projects in New Albany, roughly 400 megawatts of behind-the-meter gas generation fed by dedicated pipelines, under a 10-year power purchase agreement. Microsoft NASDAQ: MSFT ran a larger version of the same play, signing a 20-year agreement with Chevron NYSE: CVX for Project Kilby in Reeves County, Texas, a co-located gas plant targeting about 2.67 gigawatts, with first power expected in 2028. Picture what that actually looks like on the ground: a trench, a pipe tied into the nearest transmission line, metering stations on the fence line and rows of gas turbines the size of shipping containers, each one essentially a jet engine bolted to a flatbed. It is a parallel power system, built on assets midstream companies already own. NVIDIA NASDAQ: NVDA CEO Jensen Huang has said repeatedly that the constraint is energy, not compute. Gas is what is available now.

Enterprise is not a stock in the ordinary sense. It is a publicly traded partnership, and the tax structure is a large part of why its dividend is so generous: units yield roughly 5.8% on a $2.24 annualized distribution. Enterprise Products Partners Today EPD Enterprise Products Partners $38.96 +0.51 (+1.33%) As of 09/18/2026 03:59 PM Eastern This is a fair market value price provided by Massive. Learn more. 52-Week Range $30.01 ▼ $40.17 Dividend Yield 5.75% P/E Ratio 13.53 Price Target $39.87 Add to Watchlist The number that matters is not the yield, though. It is the coverage behind it. Operational distributable cash flow hit a record $2.3 billion last quarter, covering the distribution 1.9 times over. That distinction is where income investors get hurt. A high yield looks identical on a screen whether the business can fund it or not, and the ones that cannot are usually carrying too much debt or too little cash flow to survive a bad year. Enterprise is not in that position. Jovine also pointed to roughly 82% of the partnership's contracts being fee-based, which ties results to volumes moved rather than to the price of the molecule.

Energy Transfer's quarter told a similar story with more mome...