GE Vernova stock has quadrupled since April 2024 and is now the second-best performer in the S&P 500

GE Vernova is lighting up Wall Street, and no one’s pretending otherwise. Since it split from General Electric and hit the New York Stock Exchange on April 2, 2024, its stock has skyrocketed over 300%, making it the second-best performer in the S&P 500 after Palantir.

The hype hasn’t cooled off. Even after a 90% gain just this year, analysts are still screaming buy, with price targets averaging $686.68, roughly 10% higher than where it closed last Friday. This isn’t some passing trade. Investors are sticking with it because of one thing: AI’s hunger for electricity.

CEO Scott Strazik was already calling the timing “perfect” back in March 2024, one month before the company’s official launch. “Now that’s a big statement,” Scott said at GE Vernova’s investor day.

But he had a point. He warned that AI data centers would send electricity demand soaring through the end of the decade. The company, he claimed, was “purpose built” for this kind of demand surge. That looked like marketing fluff back then. It doesn’t anymore.

Gas and grid orders explode as revenue forecasts rise

This is not just a stock play. GE Vernova is loaded with cash. The company’s cash pile doubled to $8 billion by the end of 2024, and it’s planning to hit $14 billion by 2028. The goal is $45 billion in revenue that year, up from $35 billion in 2024.

The gas turbine business is sold out through 2028, with a 55-gigawatt backlog reported in June. Orders in Q2 this year were three times higher than in Q2 2024.

Scott said they’ll build up to 80 heavy-duty gas turbines annually by 2026, up from 48 in 2024. Prices are rising fast too. He didn’t name figures, but NextEra’s CEO John Ketchum said back in March that building gas plants now costs $2,400 per kilowatt, up from $785 in 2022.

That’s nearly triple the cost. Rob Wertheimer from Melius Research upgraded the stock to Buy with a $740 target, saying the price jumps from demand are “hard to internalize.”

Around 70% of gas power revenue comes from servicing 7,000+ installed turbines. Utilities are finally upgrading old turbines to squeeze out more power.

“For the first time in a decade, our customers are investing into the existing install base to a larger extent,” Scott told investors at JPMorgan’s June conference. CFO Kenneth Parks said the gas service backlog hit $56 billion by the end of 2024.

Grid gear is flying out too. Transformers and switchgears are completely sold out through 2028. The backlog reached $24 billion in Q2, almost 40% higher than the same time last year.

The company booked $500 million in electric gear orders from data centers just in the first half of 2025. For comparison, the full-year total for 2024 was $600 million. Scott told Morgan Stanley last week that they expect to hit $1 billion in direct orders from data centers before 2025 ends.

Nuclear ramps up while wind bleeds out

Scott is already looking toward the 2030s. He told Citi in February that nuclear revenue will go from helping services now to driving equipment sales later. GE Vernova wants to add five gigawatts of nuclear power in the U.S. by restarting shuttered sites and upgrading 65 reactors that use GE technology.

They’re also building new small modular reactors. The first one is already under construction in Ontario, with another planned in Tennessee. If all goes to plan, the company could pull in over $2 billion a year from small reactors by mid-2030s.

But while gas and nuclear are moving, wind is falling apart. The wind unit lost $588 million in 2024, a slight improvement from a $1 billion loss the year before.

GE Vernova runs the biggest onshore wind fleet in the U.S. with 57,000 turbines globally, but it’s getting hammered by high interest rates, turbine blade issues, and now Trump’s return to the White House. The administration’s new stance on permits and tariffs is already hurting the offshore sector.

Two big offshore projects—Vineyard Wind in Massachusetts and Dogger Bank in the UK—are facing major delays. Blade failures alone cost the company $700 million.

Then the Interior Department halted construction on Revolution Wind off Rhode Island, sparking fears that Vineyard Wind could be next. “The continued ambiguity, both with permit availability and tariffs, is continuing to demonstrate or drive softness in our end wind markets,” Scott told Morgan Stanley on September 11.

He said onshore wind revenue could drop 15% in 2026, and once Vineyard and Dogger are done, that’s it. “We won’t take on any more such projects without substantially different industry economics,” Scott told investors in January. That’s the line. The wind unit’s on life support, and no one’s throwing more cash at it.

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