EQT to buy Carlyle's Copia Power for $2.6bn AI power bet

The trade that used to be about racks and GPUs is now about megawatts and interconnection points, and the latest data point is a big one. EQT has agreed to buy Copia Power, the integrated power platform Carlyle launched, at what the Financial Times reports is a $2.6 billion valuation, with Carlyle taking a more than fivefold return on its money. The deal sits inside EQT Infrastructure VII and is expected to close by the end of 2026.

Copia is not a straight generation asset and not a straight data-center developer, it is the seam between the two. According to EQT's own announcement, the company today has over 2.6 GW of generation and storage in operation or under construction, is actively developing more than 9 GW of grid-connected data centers, and sits on a broader pipeline of more than 25 GW of solar and storage and 7 GW of natural gas. The pitch is that all of it lives at the same interconnection position, so a hyperscaler is buying firm power and a data-center pad in one contract rather than begging a utility for both.

Why that matters for AI: power, not silicon, is now the binding constraint on U.S. training and inference buildout, and interconnect queues in the big markets are measured in years. If you can hand a hyperscaler a shovel-ready campus with generation already attached, you get to price for scarcity. EQT is pretty clearly assembling that stack, EdgeConneX for colo, Zayo for fiber, Cypress Creek Energy and Scale on the energy and land side, and now Copia to weld generation directly onto the data-center load.

The honest caveat is that most of Copia's headline gigawatts are development stage rather than operating. A 9 GW pipeline is a claim, not a book of signed contracts, and neither EQT's announcement nor the FT write-up spells out how much of it is under offtake, which hyperscalers are in the mix, or how the $2.6 billion is split between equity and debt. Take the specifics as reported, not settled.

What to watch from here is whether the AI power trade is becoming a genuine platform game. Carlyle just crystallised a more than fivefold return on an asset it built from scratch, EQT is consolidating power-plus-connectivity under one roof, and the winners over the next couple of years are likely to be whoever can shorten a hyperscaler's time-to-megawatt.