Most people picture a data center as a building that plugs into the wall like a giant office, with the local utility quietly supplying the current. The fastest-growing slice of AI infrastructure does not work that way at all. Jon Najarian’s Infinite Power presentation for Banyan Hill is built around a term most retail investors have never heard: behind-the-meter power. Here is what it means, why it is reshaping the data center business, and where the money flows. Our Data Center Electricity: The Bottleneck Explained explainer covers this in detail.
What “Behind the Meter” Means
Behind the meter is exactly what it sounds like. On one side of the utility meter sits the public grid, the wires, transformers, and power plants run by the local utility. On the other side, behind the meter, sits anything that generates electricity on site for the customer’s own use, without drawing that power through the grid.
A rooftop solar array is behind-the-meter power. A hospital’s backup generator is behind-the-meter power. What is new is the scale: a data center that needs hundreds of megawatts can now stand up its own gas-turbine plant in a parking lot and skip the utility connection almost entirely. The electricity never crosses the meter, which means it never waits on interconnection queues, permitting, or the grid’s aging wires.
The Memphis Math
The example Najarian returns to is xAI’s Colossus supercomputer in Memphis. xAI needed 150 megawatts to bring the cluster online. Memphis Light, Gas and Water, the local utility, could deliver about 8. Getting the Tennessee Valley Authority to approve and build the transmission connection would have taken roughly three years.
Elon Musk’s team did not have three years. The presentation quotes the blunt framing: “Elon didn’t have three years. He needed power within four months.” So xAI trucked in roughly 35 gas-turbine “power pods,” each 91 feet long and weighing about 200,000 pounds, with a turbine and generator mounted on two trucks. Each pod ran on natural gas and could be online in under 12 hours. Together they delivered more than 400 megawatts in about 122 days. That is behind-the-meter power at data center scale, and our full Infinite Power teardown covers the build-out in more detail.
Why Utilities Cannot Keep Up
The reason this is happening now is that the public grid was never sized for AI. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave US energy infrastructure a D+ in its 2025 report card. Roughly 70% of power transformers are 25 years or older, 60% of circuit breakers are 30 years or older, and 70% of transmission lines are 25 years or older. The University of Texas Energy Institute estimates a full replacement near $5 trillion, and the Department of Energy has warned that blackouts could rise 100 times by 2030 in some scenarios.
A hyperscaler cannot wait for that repair bill to get paid. Behind-the-meter generation is the workaround, and it turns power from a utility service into a supplier market. For the demand-side story from another publisher, our Elon’s Shadow Trust review looks at an income portfolio built on the same bottleneck.
What It Means for Investors
Najarian’s pitch ties the mechanism to a specific kind of winner. Rather than the utility owning the poles, he points at the company that leases the power pods under 10-to-15-year contracts, a model he calls power as a service. The teased company is a Houston-headquartered, NYSE-listed firm near a $6 billion market cap, and its identity sits behind the $79 Market Rebel Report paywall.
The honest caveat, disclosed in the pitch itself, is concentration: 96% of the company’s 2024 Power Pod revenue came from a single customer, xAI. That is the defining risk of behind-the-meter power as an investment theme right now. The mechanism is real and growing, but the early revenues are anchored to one very large customer.
The Southaven Proof Point
The Memphis build was the proof of concept, but the Southaven, Mississippi site is the proof it scales. The same pod approach is being deployed there at roughly 100 pods and about 1.5 gigawatts, which is why Najarian argues this is a repeatable market rather than a one-off stunt. Every new behind-the-meter project adds another leased pod, and each pod is another decade of contracted revenue for the supplier.
The Honest Read
Behind-the-meter power is not a marketing coinage. It is a measurable shift in how AI infrastructure gets built, and the Memphis numbers are documented reality. The investor question is narrower than the trend: does the specific supplier Najarian is selling hold enough contracted diversification to survive, and reward, beyond a single anchor customer. That is the research question the offer hands you, and it is a fair one to ask.
Ready to see the research? Click here to access Jon Najarian’s report.
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