GE Vernova’s riding geopolitics and AI for a spectacular surge

Consider this: In November 2021, when General Electric chief executive Larry Culp announced he was splitting America’s best-known engineering firm into three – GE Aerospace, GE Healthcare Technologies and GE Vernova – the combined entity had a market valuation of about US$119 billion (S$151.5 billion). 

Today, GE Vernova alone has a valuation of about US$285 billion, much of it on the back of a near 180 per cent share price spurt in the past year – outpacing artificial intelligence-related stocks such as Nvidia and Palantir. Investors who bought GE Vernova’s shares on April 2, 2024, the day it began trading on the New York Stock Exchange with an opening price of US$142, could sell them today at US$1,063.

Who would have imagined that a firm making energy equipment like gas and wind turbines could clock this pace of value expansion? 

But it has, and with good reason. First-quarter 2026 results published on April 22 showed its order book swelling by US$18.3 billion, a growth of more than 70 per cent year on year, as all its three divisions – power, wind and electrification – performed well. 

Unsurprisingly, the stock soared 14 per cent on the day the first-quarter results were announced and rose steadily before giving up some of the gains.

Investors are enthusiastic about quarterly revenue that rose 16 per cent year on year to US$9.3 billion and management raising its guidance for the whole year of 2026.

GE Vernova, you could say, is firing on all turbines, with margins growing across its markets and orders pouring in worldwide. 

Talk to Mr Scott Strazik, GE Vernova’s 47-year-old CEO, though, and it is as though the firm may be lagging behind its opportunities.

“We are just getting started,” he says. “As much as our performance as a public company has been solid these past two years, I truly believe our potential has grown faster than our performance. The gap between potential and where we are today is only wider than when we separated from General Electric.”

To be sure, GE Vernova is enjoying twin tailwinds. 

Geopolitical risk has made energy security front and centre in national planning, translating into demand for everything from gas turbines to wind power equipment and solar panels, and a resurgence of excitement over nuclear energy. 

Then, there is the proliferation of data centres – entities that require enormous amounts of energy to run – firing up demand for electricity.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects data centres worldwide to consume twice the amount of electricity by 2030 and three times as much by 2035 compared with 2024. All this improves the economics of on-premise power and microgrid solutions that GE Vernova provides.

Operating on a mantra of “executing with discipline”, Mr Strazik, the son of a New York City official and his school teacher wife, has driven “GEV”, as some refer to it, to leap at the opportunities while staying grounded. When I met him recently, he seemed almost embarrassed that his Singapore colleagues had put him up at the classic Raffles Hotel and not something less in the lap of luxury.

The war in Western Asia, he says, has brought home the lesson that energy security is national security. And that means minimising dependence on a global supply chain, a situation that would call for the deployment of an orchestra of technologies. 

The more complex your energy mix, the more you need a reliable power grid, which means you not only need to invest in generating power but also in the grid that gathers it all up and distributes it.

“We are on the cusp of an investment super-cycle and I run the company with the expectation that we’re just getting started here.”

Currently, he explains, only a fifth of energy is derived from electricity, with all the rest coming from molecular commodities such as coal and fuel oil. That’s unsustainable, and must change.

South-east Asia, he says, is a promising market for electricity generation as the investment super-cycle kicks off, and GEV is prepared. In Vietnam, where GEV powers about a third of the nation’s electricity needs, it is even investing in what it calls a RENEW Skills Development Programme with Electric Power University in Hanoi to train 4,000 students. 

The firm also has growing businesses in Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, all of which are adding gas capacity. What’s more, with the explosion of AI data centres, all these countries are seeking to add baseload power, and much of that power will be gas-fired. As it happens, GEV is the world’s largest manufacturer of gas power equipment.

India, where GEV has 11 factories and more than 10,000 employees, remains its largest employee base in Asia. Bengaluru hosts one of the firm’s only two advanced research centres, the other being New York.

That leads to the question: What disruptive technologies can we expect in the power field that are still over the horizon at this moment?

Mr Strazik paints an era of fuel cells, solid-state transformers that replace magnetic transformers to manage voltage and AC/DC conversion, and a new generation of electrical equipment that will translate electrons from different voltage levels that are being co-developed by Indian and American engineers. Within the industry, they call this transformative science “Horizon 3” technology.

It is also about improving existing technologies.

In its vital gas turbine business, for instance, a lot of the innovation is about better materials that are more heat-resistant, new coatings and cooling methods that resist high temperatures, so the turbines can run hotter and extract more output, or perform for longer without needing an overhaul. 

In 2025, GEV announced US$14 billion of business from oil-rich Saudi Arabia as the kingdom, which currently depends on liquid fuels for 45 per cent of its electricity generation, switches to a future that will be half gas-based and half based on renewables such as solar.

In the quest to exit liquid fuels, many nations are considering going the nuclear power route. Japan is headed back to nuclear power, for instance, and so is the US. Singapore, too, has been assessing the feasibility of generating nuclear-powered electricity via small modular reactors, or SMRs. 

GEV is in that space as well. It is constructing its first SMR in Darlington, Canada, to generate 300MW of power. Multiple other countries are showing interest in SMR technology.

“Nuclear is a very attractive option because it’s a baseload power that can run 24/7 and has no carbon intensity attached. We’re going to see a real growth acceleration in that area over the next decade,” he forecasts. “SMRs are a logical fit for Singapore because you can generate a lot of electricity using limited space as compared with a wind or solar farm.”

I asked him to explain GEV’s spectacular performance since it was listed as an independent entity in April 2024.

Mr Strazik says the move has helped bring focus to each of the three companies. What is more, GEV has enjoyed an extra benefit. Pitching itself as a purpose-built company focused on electrifying and decarbonising the world has helped it attract talent that otherwise might be tempted to head towards social media firms and suchlike.

Indeed, GE Vernova moved its headquarters to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to be close to talent spots such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University. This summer, it is onboarding no fewer than 65 MIT students as interns. 

What about senior engineers? Is it harder to recruit now, thanks to the restrictions US President Donald Trump has placed on hiring via the H-1B route, including a hefty rise in the costs involved for employers and enhanced scrutiny of applications? It is not a question he seems to relish. 

“Whether on immigration reform or otherwise, we are here to respond,” he says briefly.

With so much disruption in the energy field, I wonder what could be the one technology that could survive 20 years from now. 

Gas, he says, will have a meaningful role for decades to come. “There is no technology of which I am more bullish than gas power. Of course, the way we operate it will change and that will be by blending hydrogen or ammonia to reduce carbon intensity and also with post-combustion solutions like carbon capture.”

Conversely, what would he say is the most underestimated of energy technologies?

Grid software, he responds. 

At the end of the day, grids are complicated machines, with electrons arriving from many sources of generation, including something as granular as people with solar panels on their roofs who have a little surplus to sell. 

Such complexity brings challenges, but better software can optimise the system. For GE Vernova, it is as yet a small part of the business in revenue terms – less than a billion dollars in 2025 – but about a quarter of the research and development budget is expended in that area.

Mr Strazik, who has had a stint in GE’s aviation engine business, was given charge of GE’s gas power business at age 39, and added responsibility for GE Power three years later before being named CEO of GE Vernova in 2024. 

He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in industrial labour relations from Cornell University, as well as a master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs with a focus on economics and public policy.

As a non-engineer in a top engineering firm, what did he do right to get this far?

“Throughout my career, I was always trying to do part of my boss’ job and to free up his capacity to do other things, and thus grow (myself) in the process,” he tells me. 

“And I did that in as humble a way as I could. So it was always non-threatening.”