The fact that the world's biggest energy conference is now headlined by cloud infrastructure executives tells you everything about where the money is going in 2026.
CERAWeek by S&P Global kicks off today in Houston, running March 23-27. For decades, this was the conference where oil executives and energy ministers set the agenda. This year, the speaker list reads like a hyperscaler org chart: Ruth Porat (Alphabet President and Chief Investment Officer), Brad Smith (Microsoft Vice Chair and President), Kerry Person (AWS VP of Data Center Planning and Delivery), Amanda Peterson Corio (Google's Global Head of Data Center Energy), Marc Spieler (NVIDIA's Senior Managing Director for Global Energy), and Patrick Ryan (Meta's Principal of Energy Strategy).
That is not a sideshow panel. Those are the headliners. At an energy conference.
The numbers driving the convergence
The reason these executives are in Houston, not at re:Invent or Google Cloud Next, is electricity. Training and running AI models requires staggering amounts of power, and the hyperscalers are collectively projected to spend over $600 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, according to Data Center Knowledge, citing Synergy Research Group data. Amazon alone has projected $200 billion in 2026 capex spending, up from $131 billion in 2025, per TechCrunch. Google is not far behind, with estimates between $175 billion and $185 billion, roughly double its 2025 spending.
These are not R&D budgets. This is concrete, copper, and silicon. According to Synergy Research Group, 1,297 hyperscale data centers are currently operational worldwide, with a pipeline of 770 more at various stages of planning and construction. Total hyperscale capacity is expected to double in just over 12 quarters.
CERAWeek 2026's theme is "Convergence and Competition: Energy, Technology and Geopolitics." Daniel Yergin, conference chair and Vice Chairman of S&P Global, said in the conference announcement: "The energy and technology industries are converging like never before."
What the chip deals tell us
Four days before CERAWeek opened, Nvidia and AWS confirmed a deal for 1 million GPU chips, with sales starting this year and extending through 2027. Ian Buck, Nvidia's VP of Hyperscale and High-Performance Computing, told Reuters the deal goes well beyond GPUs, including Nvidia's Spectrum networking chips and the Groq chips Nvidia released after its $17 billion licensing deal with an AI chip startup late last year.
