$3.3B USDA Loan to a Georgia Co-op Just Wired Rural America Into the AI Power Grid

On October 14, 2026, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins stood at the construction site of Oglethorpe Power's Smarr Combined-Cycle plant in Monroe County, Georgia, and signed off on a $3.3 billion loan — the largest single award in the 90-year history of the agency's Rural Utilities Service. The two-unit, 1,425 MW natural-gas facility is being built for a nonprofit cooperative that wholesales electricity to 38 member-owned electric membership corporations (EMCs) across rural Georgia, with commercial operation slated for 2029.

The Smarr plant sits in the same Monroe County as Plant Scherer — Georgia Power's 3,520 MW coal-fired complex that the Georgia Public Service Commission voted in July 2025 to keep running past its 2028 retirement date specifically to serve data-center demand. One county over, in Fayetteville, Microsoft's Fairwater Atlanta AI data center is already in commercial operation on a 615-acre QTS-owned campus; in October 2025, Microsoft unveiled Fairwater as the second node of an AI \"superfactory\" connected to Wisconsin in near-real-time.

Every dollar of RUS financing on a generation project flows downstream into a small set of US-listed suppliers. The Smarr plant is a textbook example: GE Vernova is supplying the two 7HA.03 gas turbines (manufactured in Greenville, South Carolina); Kiewit subsidiary The Industrial Company is the EPC contractor; the project also includes a 7.8-mile, 500-kV transmission line connecting the plant to the regional grid — exactly the kind of high-voltage work Quanta Services dominates.

The turbine selection is the most consequential decision in the deal. GE Vernova's 7HA.03 is the same heavy-duty frame Microsoft just bought seven of for a Texas data center, and the same family Alphabet/xAI's Colossus 1 is running on. GE Vernova ended Q2 2026 with a $176 billion total backlog and reported data-center orders above $5 billion in the first half alone — more than double its full-year 2025 total. The company has guided 2026 revenue up to $45.5–46.5 billion and free cash flow to $11.5B+, with CEO Scott Strazik pointing to 2031 reservation slots already being taken.

The Smarr deal is one of two models competing for the same megawatt of AI load. The other is long-dated, hyperscale-direct nuclear power purchase agreements — and that side has already booked the marquee names. Constellation Energy holds a 20-year PPA with Microsoft to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1 as the 835 MW \"Crane Clean Energy Center,\" targeted for 2028 operation; another 20-year PPA with Meta Platforms for ~1,121 MW from the Clinton Clean Energy Center in Illinois; and a 20-year PPA with Alphabet to support ~890 MW of capacity across 11 reactors.

Vistra's January 2026 Meta package was the inflection: more than 2,600 MW from three PJM nuclear plants (Perry, Davis-Besse, and Clinton), with uprate work to begin delivering additional output as soon as December 2026. Cumulatively, Meta is pursuing up to 6.6 GW of nuclear capacity via its Vistra, TerraPower, and Oklo agreements. Both Constellation Energy and Vistra sit on top-quartile forward earnings multiples — Vistra trades at a 13.3x forward P/E despite a 78% one-year share-price run; Constellation Energy trades at ~20.7x forward P/E off $31.3B in trailing revenue and ~22 GW of nuclear capacity.

A week before USDA closed the Smarr loan, a federal appeals court shut down the policy lever the Trump administration had been using to keep aging coal plants alive. On September 11, 2026, the D.C. Circuit Court vacated the Department of Energy's Section 202(c) emergency order keeping Consumers Energy's J.H. Campbell coal plant in West Olive, Michigan running past its retirement date, ruling that long-term resource adequacy risks do not constitute an emergency under the Federal Power Act. The court also rejected a follow-on move to compel grid operator MISO to honor the order.

The ruling didn't just retire a single coal unit — it foreclosed the federal government's most aggressive tool for propping up coal-fired baseload. With the \"coal lifeline\" off the table, the next megawatt of new firm capacity has to come from somewhere else. In Georgia, that \"somewhere else\" is now a federally financed combined-cycle gas plant underwritten by RUS, sitting next to a data center campus being built by Alphabet, and adjacent to a coal plant (Southern Company's Plant Scherer) that the state has already ordered kept online to serve the same load.

Three of the publicly traded counterparties in this story already have AI-power exposure priced into their multiples; the fourth — the regulated utility incumbent — does not.

GE Vernova and Quanta Services have rerated most aggressively: GEV ran a ~28.8x trailing P/E on Q2 TTM revenue of $41.4B and a $176B backlog, and PWR traded at a 73x trailing P/E with a ~$44–50B backlog and 41% year-on-year Q2 revenue growth. Vistra is the cheapest on forward earnings despite locking in 20-year hyperscale PPAs; Constellation Energy sits in the middle with a 20.7x forward multiple. Southern Company, which owns Georgia Power, has a regulated-utility valuation profile and a market cap that has not yet caught up to the data-center load it has been ordered to serve — its investment case is volume-driven rate-base growth, not a multiple rerating.