Energy IPOs raise $12.6 billion in first half of 2026, biggest half since late 1999, as AI's binding constraint shifts from silicon to power

In every major infrastructure build-out, capital rotates to whatever is the binding constraint, and the equity tape usually announces that rotation before the underlying companies do. The first half of 2026 just put that pattern on the screen.

Energy IPOs raised $12.6 billion from January through June, the largest half since the dotcom peak in late 1999 and roughly triple the $4.3 billion raised across all of 2025, according to Dealogic data cited by Ars Technica. Standard Nuclear is expected to price later this month; Fervo Energy, X-Energy, Fermi, and Deep Fission are either pricing, filed, or already trading. GMO launched a dedicated power-infrastructure ETF this week.

The naive read is bubble: dotcom rhyme, IPO volume, late-cycle froth. The structural read is different. US electricity demand is projected to climb 39% by 2035, much of it from data centers that each draw around 876,000 megawatt-hours a year, roughly the household load of a mid-sized Western city. The offtake is contracted before the shares trade. That is not how the 1999 deals worked.

The chip trade bought the visible frontier. The next leg of the AI trade is buying the constraint it cannot scale past. When the bottleneck is power, the picks live down the stack: generation, grid, fuel, and the funds that wrap them.