Stock market investors who bet big on electricity producers amid all the hype around powering artificial intelligence watched those stocks collapse Monday after the Chinese startup DeepSeek rolled out a cheaper AI model and decimated the broader U.S. tech market.
The value of AI-exposed electricity stocks tumbled: Constellation Energy, which has a nuclear pact with Microsoft, lost 21 percent; Vistra Corp., which wants to build more gas-fired generation for data centers in Texas, lost 24 percent; and GE Vernova, the gas turbine maker riding high on revenues tied to power demand, lost 21 percent.
Oklo, the small nuclear startup backed by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, took a 25 percent hit.
The Wall Street freakout is only the latest moment in an era of increasing energy chaos. Constant reshuffling of the political and financial decks has made it harder for electric grid and utility planners to forecast future demand. Forecasting is the North Star for allocating investments in power generation and transmission infrastructure.
