Vistra Corp. VST

The business

Vistra owns power plants and sells electricity to the people who use it. Roughly 44,000 megawatts of generation across gas, nuclear, coal, solar and batteries, and about five million retail customers in eighteen states buying the output. Owning both ends is the point: the retail book hedges the generation fleet, so a price spike that hurts one helps the other.

What changed the story is the nuclear fleet. Comanche Peak in Texas and the plants in the Pennsylvania and New Jersey market are carbon-free, run continuously, and sit near where data centres want to be. That has turned a set of assets nobody wanted a decade ago into the scarcest thing in American power.