Hello, Reader.

Worldwide attitudes toward energy supplies have pivoted sharply from “just in time” to “just in case.” Gone are the days when countries blithely assumed that supertankers full of crude oil would arrive at their ports tomorrow, just as reliably as they did yesterday.

The energy world has changed, and there’s no going back to what was.

Two massive, concurrent forces are colliding to create what could become one of the most durable energy bull markets in modern history.

Together, they are stoking a fire under every corner of the energy complex – oil and gas, solar and wind, battery storage, nuclear, pipelines, and grid infrastructure alike.

In today’s Smart Money, let’s examine these two forces and the market opportunities they’re uniquely creating in the energy sector

Then, I’ll show you how to profit effectively.

Force One: The Great Energy Nationalization

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 fired the first warning flare over the energy markets. It reminded Europe – and much of the rest of the world – that energy dependence is a strategic vulnerability.

Countries that had spent decades optimizing for cheap energy suddenly scrambled for any energy.

Despite it being a rude awakening, it still failed to open the eyes of most energy-importing nations. They simply hit the “snooze” button and carried on as before.

Then came Iran.

The U.S.-Israel attack on Iran fired a second warning flare – one that proved impossible to ignore.

Because the conflict abruptly choked off a critical artery of worldwide oil supplies, the global economy started gasping for breath almost immediately. Countries that rely heavily on fossil fuel imports watched their energy costs surge overnight.

The message was unmistakable: depend on someone else’s energy supply at your peril.

Before the Iran conflict, the macro data suggested that global energy markets were in balance. But that “balance” never resembled the symmetrical Scales of Justice; it was more like a circus elephant atop a stool.

It was precarious, and has become even more so, which is why each of the recent energy shocks has strengthened the case for countries to build their own energy supply from the ground up.

So, an urgent, planet-wide capital expenditure program is now underway. If the past is prologue, even the most aggressive forecasts will fall short of reality.

But that’s only the first force causing investors to rush and adjust their energy investments…

Force Two: AI Sleeps for No One

Now for the second force – the one that arrived without warning, upended every energy forecast on the planet, and shows no sign of slowing.

Artificial intelligence needs power. A lot of it.

As recently as 2022, data centers consumed roughly 300 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity globally – a figure that had barely budged for nearly a decade, because efficiency improvements in computing hardware had kept pace with the growth in workloads. The International Energy Agency (IEA) looked at that flat-line trend and predicted a decade more of the same.

Then ChatGPT launched in November 2022… and everything changed.

By 2024, global data center electricity consumption had reached 415 TWh. By 2025, it jumped to 500 – a 20% surge in a single year. The IEA now projects it will reach 945 TWh by 2030.

The most aggressive forecasters see even more. Goldman Sachs has raised its 2030 forecast three times in the last 14 months, most recently to 1,350 TWh – or more than triple the 2022 consensus.

Looking further down the road, BloombergNEF projects that data centers will consume 1,600 TWh globally by 2035. To put that in perspective: If data centers were a country and consumed that volume of electricity today, they would be the world’s fourth-largest consumer – behind only China, the United States, and India.

In the U.S. specifically, data centers are on track to account for nearly half of all incremental electricity demand growth through 2030. The construction statistics tell the same story. Global data center installations rose 22% in 2025 – the second consecutive record year – with 24.8 GW of new capacity currently under construction.

And U.S. electric utilities seem to have gotten the message.

Mizuho Securities tracks the capital expenditure plans and found that U.S. utilities will ramp their 2026 spending by 70% over the 2025 total, which was itself a record – and more than five times the magnitude of the increases Mizuho tracked in the early 2020s.

The three biggest up-sizers tell the story:

• Duke Energy Corp. (DUK) raised its five-year capital plan by $11.5 billion, bringing its 2026-2030 generation, transmission, and distribution budget to $90 billion.
• The Southern Co. (SO) raised its five-year plan by roughly 50%, from $37 billion to $56 billion.
• American Electric Power Co. Inc. (AEP) bumped its planned spending by 50% as well, to $74 billion.

This is what “energy, everywhere, all at once” looks like in practice.

And as electricity demand ramps up, the opportunity to expand your portfolio also increases…

The Opportunity Lives in the Gap

This isn’t a story about one technology winning. It’s a story about all energy technologies winning – at different times, in different places, for different customers – because the world simultaneously needs more of every kind of power.

Therefore, in a stock market trading at historically elevated valuations – where investors pay dearly for growth that may or may not materialize – the energy sector offers a more compelling opportunity: attractive valuations, combined with multiple, compounding, structural growth drivers.

At Fry’s Investment Report, we’re soaking up that opportunity. Our portfolio’s wide range of energy stocks shows we’re prepared for the serious impact that nationalization of energy, the rise of data centers, and surges in electricity demand will have on the energy sector.

I discussed one way we’re prepared in last Saturday’s issue, where I examine how solar power will expand in the current AI era and how investors can ride the profit wave with our pick that’s currently up almost 80%.

The experts have chronically and consistently underestimated energy investment trends.

They are still underestimating it today.

That gap between what the forecasters expect and what the world actually needs is where the investment opportunity lives.

Click here to learn more about Fry’s Investment Report and how to join our approach to profiting from energy’s surging demand.

And look out for tomorrow’s Smart Money, where I’ll detail one of my favorite opportunities in a specific section of the sector.

Regards,

Eric Fry

The post The Two Forces Creating One Massive Energy Bull Market – and How to Join It appeared first on InvestorPlace.

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