AI's insatiable appetite for electricity could revive a forsaken energy source

Coal could come back. That was my insight, or more, my instinct, after interviewing Kenny Young, the CEO and seven-year veteran of Babcock & Wilcox , the 160-year-old boiler manufacturer turned engineering and construction company. Young wanted to talk about the surging demand for power spurred by the data center boom. So did I. B & W has a $2.7 billion backlog, $2.4 billion of which is a deal with Base Electron, backed by Applied Digital , a company purpose-built to design digital infrastructure for high-performance computing. I want to write about this "Mad Money" encounter for a few reasons. First, to show you that the data center story is so much bigger than we imagine. Our thinking is constrained by a particular negative bias that says it all has to end, like the dot-com crash of the early aughts. That bias has kept people from making easy money, like the money you would have made by buying Babcock & Wilcox stock, which is up 244% this year alone. This $21 stock traded below $1 one year ago. Second, I am no groundbreaker here: obviously, I'm late to the party. But that has somehow meant nothing to so many of these companies — witness Micron , Intel , Sandisk — that I must acknowledge my timing. Some of you might consider it late, late, late, as I wrote about last week . …