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

The trading strategy that works BECAUSE you have a life (From Tim Sykes)

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).

Hyperscalers Are Routing Around the Utility Grid

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 Products Pairs a Record Quarter With a 5.8% Yield

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.

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 Is Getting Repriced on Cash Flow, Not Hope

Energy Transfer's quarter told a similar story with more momentum behind it. Distributable cash flow jumped 32% year over year to $2.59 billion, and unitholders collected the nineteenth consecutive distribution increase, to 34 cents per unit, for a yield near 6.4%.

Jovine's read is that this is a repricing rather than a melt-up. If the cash reaching owners rises by roughly a third, the units following it up is arithmetic, not enthusiasm.

What supports the next leg is the contract structure. These are not products sold quarter to quarter at whatever the market will bear. They are 10- and 20-year agreements with counterparties among the largest companies in the world, and fee-based contracts on both the supply and delivery side leave the operator collecting a spread whether gas rises, falls or goes nowhere.

Williams Trades Yield for Growth Investors Can See

Williams is a conventional corporation, so the yield sits lower, near 2.9%. What it offers instead is torque, and a little more volatility with it.

Second-quarter net income rose 51%. The company also closed the Momentum Midstream acquisition for up to $5.5 billion and raised its long-term EBITDA growth target above 11% annually through 2030.

Consider what that growth rate means for a company this old. Williams spent decades as a consolidator, buying competitors and cutting costs to manufacture mid-single-digit expansion.

Data center demand handed it something it has not had in a generation: organic customers arriving with signed contracts, wanting capacity Williams already controls.

Permitting Is the Real Swing Factor Here

The upside case rests on scarcity. Few new long-haul gas pipelines get built in the United States, which turns existing capacity into a genuine moat, and long-term contracts with investment-grade counterparties convert that moat into decades of contracted revenue.

The risk sits in the same place. Siting boards, local opposition to data centers and permitting delays can push projects to the right, and the spending required to chase this demand is heavy and increasingly debt-funded.

Washington is leaning the other way for now. Alan Armstrong, who ran Williams from 2011 through 2025, was appointed to the U.S. Senate in March 2026 and has named infrastructure permitting as his top priority through the end of his term in January 2027. Jovine, who has met with House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie, said the competitive race with China keeps energy policy unusually bipartisan inside working groups, whatever the tone in public.

For investors, the tell is not the price of natural gas. Watch new contract announcements and distribution coverage, because those are what move these names.

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