So… I never got into Pokémon as a kid. Didn’t trade the cards, didn’t battle my friends, and I definitely wasn’t the guy wandering around a mall parking lot playing Pokémon Go (if that was your thing, no judgment… but also, kind of judgment).
But if I had gotten into it, I imagine chasing rare cards feels a lot like what Talen Energy is doing right now. Except instead of holographic Charizards, they’re out collecting power plants like they’re building an industrial Pokédex. And this week? They just snagged two big ones.
Talen dropped $3.5 billion to grab a pair of combined-cycle natural gas plants: the Moxie Freedom Energy Center in Pennsylvania and the Guernsey Power Station in Ohio. (Yes, “Guernsey” sounds like a fake town from Parks and Rec, but it’s very real and very full of natural gas.) These aren’t just any power plants—they’re efficient, flexible, and crucially, they plug into the PJM Interconnection: the most important power grid in the U.S., stretching from Virginia to Chicago. Basically, if you’re trying to feed electricity to the AI monster, this is the outlet you want to be plugged into.
The market loved the news of the acquisition.Talen’s stock jumped 24.5% on Friday, closing at $324.94, an all-time high. That caps off a more-than a 150% gain over the past 12 months. Not bad for a company most investors hadn’t even heard of until they signed a headline-grabbing nuclear power deal with Amazon Web Services last month. That deal secured 1,920 megawatts of carbon-free nuclear power from Talen’s Susquehanna plant through 2042, and it’s rumored they might even add Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) down the line.
As we all know, AI data centers… the kind training massive language models, generating 3D worlds, or running a thousand simultaneous ChatGPT sessions … use a ton of electricity. We’re talking more than some small cities. And while the AI hype has mostly focused on chips, models, and software, the companies building these massive digital warehouses are starting to panic about power. The U.S. grid is stretched, and new capacity takes years to build. That’s where Talen comes in.
This is where Talen is playing chess while others are doodling on whiteboards. They’re building a custom energy portfolio for the AI era: nuclear for ESG and base load, natural gas for reliability and quick ramp-up, and PJM grid access for scale. More importantly, they’re doing it with actual infrastructure (meaning: it’s real). This is why Wall Street analysts have started to wake up. UBS raised their price target on TLN to $399, up from $366. Jefferies bumped theirs to $380, Evercore ISI landed at $372, and Morgan Stanley, always a little more reserved, now has them at $330. That’s a potential 14–23% upside from where the stock trades today.
Now look, it’s not a perfect setup. Talen is taking on $3.8 billion in new debt to fund this deal, and energy markets tend to be bipolar. This stock isn’t cheap anymore, either… its had a heck of a run.
But if you’re thinking beyond the next earnings call, this is one of the few companies actually doing something real at the AI + energy crossroads. Not pitching ideas. Not hyping prototypes. Actually building. So yeah, you might want to keep Talen on your radar. Everyone keeps asking “who’s going to power the AI boom?”... well, this might be one of the few names with an actual shot at answering that.
At the time this article was published Stocks.News had positions in Amazon as mentioned in article.
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