Baker Hughes booked 1.1 gigawatts for an unnamed buyer. The turbines are not running

Baker Hughes said on 27 October that a major US technology company has ordered power and cooling for high-density computing. The power package is 34 Frame 5 gas turbines, nine NovaLT16 turbines, BRUSH generators and the gears that go with them. The company says that set is to provide approximately 1.1 gigawatts. The power order was booked in the third quarter. Chart dry coolers, for a closed-loop system, were booked in the fourth. Booked is an entry in Baker Hughes’s order book. It is not a megawatt-hour anyone has used.

The release says the power is for AI model training, inference, and what it calls physical AI workloads. That last phrase is the company’s, and it is the only line that reaches a robot. It does not name a factory, a fleet, or a machine that would draw the load. Training and inference are the data centre. Physical AI is a label on the same order, not a separate plant.

What the release does not contain is the rest of the job. No customer name. No parish, campus or address. No price. No delivery year. No date the first turbine would be installed, and no statement that any of this power is already on. An order for 43 machines that adds up, in the company’s words, to about 1.1 gigawatts is still an order. The large gas turbines from the bigger makers were already booked through 2029. These Frame 5 and NovaLT units are a different size of machine. The release does not say when Baker Hughes can build them.

Lorenzo Simonelli, the chairman and chief executive, said the AI revolution runs on energy, and that Baker Hughes is building the systems for it. That is the seller’s sentence. The checkable facts are narrower: an unnamed US technology company, 43 turbines in two models, generators and gears, dry coolers, and approximately 1.1 gigawatts written into an order. Until the buyer is named and a site has a connection date, the 1.1 gigawatts is capacity on a contract, not power at a meter.