Gas, AI, and My Portfolio’s Existential Dread

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Everyone’s talking about AI. It’s exhausting. My brother-in-law, bless his heart, tried to explain it to my mother using only sock puppets. It didn’t go well. She mostly asked if the puppets needed sweaters. Anyway, the point is, everyone’s piling into tech stocks, convinced they’re riding the next big wave. And frankly, looking at my own portfolio, it feels less like surfing and more like being slowly submerged in a sea of semiconductors.

It’s not that I dislike money, of course. It’s just… diversifying feels like a responsible adult activity, and responsible adult activities are often profoundly dull. But then I started noticing something. All this AI, all this processing power… it requires electricity. An obscene amount of it. Like, enough to make my electric bill blush. And where does that electricity often come from? Natural gas. Which brings us to Kinder Morgan (KMI 0.40%).

Cashing in on Robust Gas Demand

I confess, I used to think of pipelines as something you saw in old Westerns, not a shrewd investment. But Kinder Morgan, it turns out, is essentially the plumbing for the AI revolution. Last year, they had a record year, largely fueled by liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals. They’re currently moving about 8 billion cubic feet of gas a day to these facilities, and they expect that to jump to 12 billion by 2028. They’re predicting a 17% increase in LNG demand by 2030. It’s a lot of gas. A frankly unsettling amount of gas.

And it’s not just LNG. These AI data centers, these humming, blinking temples of computational power, need a constant, reliable energy source. Kinder Morgan is actively pursuing opportunities to supply over 10 billion cubic feet of gas a day to meet this demand. Nearly 70% of the future power needs of data centers in states they serve will be met by their infrastructure. Which is… a lot. It’s enough to make you wonder if the robots will eventually need therapy.

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Visible Growth with More to Come

They’ve already secured $10 billion in growth capital projects, most of which are gas infrastructure, and about 60% of that will support power generation. They’re building pipelines. Actual pipelines. It feels… solid. Like something you could rely on. They’ve got long-term contracts and regulated rate structures, which, let’s be honest, is a welcome change from the volatility of the tech sector. Another $10 billion in potential projects are in the works, driven by demand from utilities. Georgia Power, for example, is projecting 53 gigawatts of power demand by the early 2030s – equivalent to roughly 10 billion cubic feet of gas a day. That’s just one state. One utility. It’s enough to make you feel slightly breathless.

A Great Way to Cash in on the AI Megatrend

Look, I’m not saying you should abandon tech stocks altogether. My brother-in-law would be devastated. But if your portfolio is starting to resemble a Silicon Valley monoculture, Kinder Morgan might be worth a look. It’s a way to diversify, earn a dividend yield of over 4%, and still participate in the AI boom. It’s… sensible. Almost boringly so. But sometimes, sensible is good. Sometimes, you just want a solid, reliable investment that doesn’t require you to understand the intricacies of neural networks. Sometimes, you just want a pipeline.

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2026-01-25 17:12