GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik: turbines 'mostly sold out through 2030'

GE Vernova's story is no longer about demand arriving — it is about whether the company can physically build fast enough to meet it. Management signed 20 GW of gas contracts in the second quarter alone and points to at least 125 GW of gas equipment under contract by the end of 2026, while annual turbine output is scheduled to climb from 20 GW in Q3 2026 to 24 GW in 2028 and 30 GW in 2030. The gap between what customers want and what factories can ship is what allows Scott Strazik to describe the order book as essentially closed through the end of the decade.

The electrification business has become a second engine behind power. Q2 electrification orders grew 66% organically at a book-to-bill of 1.7x, and data center orders passed $5 billion year-to-date, more than double all of 2025. Strazik also flagged that the roughly $300 million per gigawatt of data-center scope today could grow to two to three times that as solid-state transformers and medium-voltage UPS blocks commercialize — a reminder that the revenue per project is not fixed.

The cash picture is what changed the shareholder story. Q2 free cash flow of $5.1 billion exceeded all of 2025, and management raised its 2026 free cash flow guidance to $11.5 billion to $12.5 billion from a prior range of $6.5 billion to $7.5 billion. That revision, paired with a doubled dividend and a $10 billion buyback authorization, suggests the bottleneck is currently working in GE Vernova's favor. Whether that holds depends on execution at the factory level — the "mostly sold out" framing is a demand statement, and the test is whether output schedules can keep the backlog converting on time, especially for hyperscalers whose data-center buildouts are waiting on turbines.