Hey Traders,

The fight over new data centers keeps getting louder. Local opposition blocked or delayed at least 120 projects worth about $198 billion in the first half of this year, according to Data Center Watch. On Sept. 16th, the House voted 417-3 to make the biggest data centers pay for their own grid upgrades.

Stocks tied to a single project are already feeling it. On Sept. 24th, Oracle (ORCL) sent a force majeure notice (a contract clause that lets a company push back payments when events outside its control get in the way) on Project Jupiter, its giant New Mexico campus that's been stuck in permit fights and local opposition. Oracle says the site's still on schedule, but the stock fell more than 3 percent, and so did last week's love, Bloom Energy (BE), which has the contract to power the site with its fuel cells.

Pushback like this reroutes demand. When permits stall and zoning boards turn into battlegrounds, the money moves toward squeezing more capacity out of the infrastructure that's already standing. That's still the cleanest way to own the AI power story without owning a local political fight.

One to Love: Nobody Pickets a Transformer

Bloom's angle was making power on-site and skipping the interconnection queue (the multi-year line to plug a new project into the grid). This week I'm shifting from making new power to maintaining and expanding the grid we've already got. Eaton (ETN) fits that, and so does Quanta Services (PWR), which has carried this same "electrons wherever they need to go" idea all year.

Eaton makes the switchgear (heavy-duty equipment that routes and protects power), transformers and power management hardware that utilities and hyperscalers (the giant cloud companies) need just to keep up with load growth. Last quarter, its Electrical Americas segment, the one selling into data centers, posted record sales of $4 billion, up 18% organically. Rolling 12-month orders jumped 41% , and the backlog grew 33% from a year ago.

Eaton doesn't need to know which county wins a zoning fight. A hyperscaler that loses a vote in one state builds in another, and the switchgear order follows the project. New build or upgrade, the megawatts run through Eaton's order book.

The stock isn't bulletproof. It fell 7.6% on Sept. 14th when talk of an AI spending slowdown hit the tape, closing almost 18% below its August high. Nothing in that order book changed, and that's the setup I want to own while permitting fights and NIMBY (not in my backyard) headlines keep coming.

One to Leave: The Meter's Still Running

The leave runs on the same instinct, pointed at people instead of power. If the physical world has to squeeze more out of what it already has, agentic AI (software agents that finish whole jobs on their own) does the same thing to human labor, and it isn't gentle about it. Accenture (ACN) shows that more clearly than anyone.

For two decades, the model was billing big teams of consultants by the hour to build and maintain enterprise software. Agentic AI takes a swing at every piece of that. An agent can migrate a codebase or triage a support ticket end to end without a bench of junior staff behind it.

The numbers already show the strain. New bookings (the value of fresh contracts signed) fell 3 percent in local currency last quarter, and about $2 billion in managed services deals slipped into next fiscal year. Management trimmed its full-year growth forecast to 3 to 4 percent, and the stock dropped 18% that June day to a level it hadn't seen since 2016.

Then it bounced about 50 percent off the low by mid-September. Guggenheim downgraded it on Sept. 18th anyway, saying its checks didn't show demand improving to match the rally. The same day, Accenture and Anthropic said they each plan to put at least $1 billion into AI safety work over five years, and the stock has since given back much of the pop that followed.

Even after the bounce, Accenture's down about 30th on the year. It reports Oct. 1, and the live debate on Wall Street is whether AI is quietly cannibalizing the business model itself. That debate keeps a lid on the stock even on a decent print, because every call now gets read through one question: how much of this quarter's growth came from work an agent could have done instead?

A business that sells human hours by the seat sits first in line for agentic AI to eat.

The big mystery is whether either one of these picks is going to dominate Monday’s Ticker Highlight Show and become the option play of the week.

Find out by tapping on this link and joining before Monday at 10:30 AM ET.

Here for a good time… AND a long time,

Hans