An Israeli Firm Buys a 5.6-Gigawatt US Data Centre Pipeline

Stark Power, an Israeli energy and infrastructure development company, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the American developer Sagebrush Infrastructure Partners, known as SAGE, the company announced in a statement issued from Jerusalem on 9 June 2026. The deal adds a development pipeline of 5.6 gigawatts of hyperscale data centre capacity across the central United States.

According to the announcement, the portfolio consists of five campuses under development, supported by co-located natural gas-fired power plants intended to supply dedicated electricity and reduce reliance on constrained power grids. Stark Power said the acquisition strengthens its ability to serve artificial intelligence and cloud-computing operators looking for faster access to power, and that it brings across SAGE's founding team, which has previously developed and sold on 4.2 gigawatts of energy projects. The company said it had recently raised approximately $140m from Israeli institutional investors.

Why the power plant now comes with the building

A hyperscale data centre is a very large facility built for a single major operator, and its binding constraint is increasingly electricity rather than land or chips. Carbon Brief, summarising International Energy Agency projections in September 2025, reported that data centres accounted for just over 1% of global electricity demand in 2024 and that their consumption is expected to more than double by 2030 to about 945 terawatt hours. The same analysis reported the IEA's estimate that artificial intelligence's share of data centre power use could rise from between 5% and 15% to between 35% and 50% by the end of the decade.

That is the pressure behind "co-located" generation. Connecting a new campus to an existing utility grid can mean waiting years in an interconnection queue; building a gas plant on the same site sidesteps the queue and gives the operator firm capacity it controls. Israel Defense reported that Stark Power's approach focuses on developing the energy assets it needs before building large-scale digital infrastructure.

An Israeli listed company buying into the American build-out

Stark Power is traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. Its announcement of 8 June 2026 stated that it is acquiring 100% of SAGE, that the lead project, Sagebrush 1, is positioned to support more than 1.5 gigawatts of capacity with adjacent utility-scale power infrastructure already under construction, and that the roughly $140m raised from Israeli institutions amounts to about NIS 430m. The release named SAGE's founders as Todd Cater, Timothy Dertzbaugh and Michael Whalen.

For context on scale: 5.6 gigawatts is a development pipeline rather than operating capacity, and pipelines of this kind are routinely built out over years, in phases, and not always in full.

What is still unclear

The announcement did not disclose the purchase price or how the acquisition is being financed beyond the institutional raise. It did not name the five campuses or the states they sit in, identify any customer for the capacity, or give a construction and energisation timetable. Nor did it say what regulatory or permitting approvals the gas plants still require.