The artificial intelligence boom is usually told as a story about chips. Javier Loya thinks that misses the harder half of the equation.
Loya spent nearly two decades at the center of global energy markets as co-founder of OTC Global Holdings, the Houston firm he built into the world’s largest independent commodity brokerage before its acquisition by BGC Group in 2025. Today, as Founder and Chairman of GETCHOICE!, a technology company serving the utilities industry, he watches the same collision from the other side: unprecedented demand meeting infrastructure that was never designed for it.
“Everyone is counting GPUs. Almost nobody was counting megawatts until recently,” Loya says. “A data center is an energy project with servers inside. The companies that understood that early are the ones getting built right now. The ones that did not are sitting in interconnection queues.”
A demand shock the grid did not see coming
American electricity demand was essentially flat for two decades. That stability shaped everything: how utilities planned, how regulators approved projects, how slowly transmission got built. Then data centers, electrification, and reshored manufacturing arrived at once, and load forecasts that had not moved in twenty years started climbing every quarter.
The bottleneck, Loya argues, is not generation capacity in the abstract. It is timing. A hyperscale campus can go from land purchase to racks in two to three years. New transmission and utility-scale generation routinely take five to ten. That mismatch is now the defining constraint on where digital infrastructure gets built, and it is quietly redrawing the economic map in favor of states that can deliver power fast.
“Markets hate a queue,” he says. “When the traditional path to power takes seven years and your build cycle is three, capital does not wait. It routes around the problem.”
Routing around the problem
One of the clearest signs of that rerouting is the rise of on-site generation. Rather than waiting for utility interconnection, a growing number of data center developers are installing their own prime power capacity behind the meter, bridging the gap until grid service arrives or bypassing it altogether. Firms that specialize in on-site power systems, such as Prime Power, have made the case that for data centers, self-generation has shifted from an emergency backstop to a core siting strategy, an argument the market is increasingly validating with every behind-the-meter megawatt that comes online.
Loya sees the shift as a rational market response rather than a workaround. “For fifty years, backup generation was an insurance policy you hoped never to use,” he says. “Now it is a bridge asset with a return profile. That is what happens when the value of a delivered megawatt goes up: the market finds new ways to deliver it.”
The efficiency dividend
The same price signal, he notes, is forcing a reckoning on the demand side. When power was cheap and abundant, waste was invisible. When every megawatt is contested, energy management becomes a boardroom discipline. It is the layer Loya works on daily at GETCHOICE!, where utilities and their customers turn consumption data into accountability, and it is an argument he has made before: the companies that win the next decade will not be the ones that simply procure energy better, but the ones that build operational intelligence around it.
“The cheapest megawatt is still the one you never waste,” he says. “AI is going to force American companies to get serious about that for the first time in a generation. That is not a burden. That is overdue.”
Texas as the proving ground
Loya, who has spent his career in Houston, believes his home state will settle most of these questions first. Texas combines the country’s fastest-growing large grid, a deregulated market structure that moves quickly, abundant natural gas, and the biggest pipeline of announced data center capacity in the nation.
“Texas is where every energy thesis gets tested first,” he says. “If the demand problem gets solved, it gets solved here, and the playbook gets exported everywhere else. The next decade of American competitiveness runs through the grid. I would rather we figure it out in Texas than wait for someone else to.”
About Javier Loya: Javier Loya is a Houston-based entrepreneur, co-founder of OTC Global Holdings, Founder and Chairman of GETCHOICE!, and a minority owner of the NFL’s Houston Texans. Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, he is a graduate of Columbia University and an active supporter of education and opportunity initiatives across Texas.
