Venture Global, Inc. (VG) 2026 Q3 法說會逐字稿

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Venture Global, Inc. third-quarter 2026 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) I will now hand the conference over to Ben Nolan, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations. Ben, please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to Venture Global, Inc.'s Third Quarter 2026 earnings call. I'm joined this morning by Mike Sabel, Venture Global's CEO, Executive Co-Chairman and Founder; Jack Thayer, our CFO; and other members of Venture Global senior management team. Before I begin, I would like to remind all listeners that our remarks, including answers to your questions, may contain forward-looking statements, and actual results could differ materially from what is described in these statements. I encourage you to refer to the disclaimers in our earnings presentation, which is available on the Investors section of our website.

Additionally, we may include references to certain non-GAAP metrics such as consolidated adjusted EBITDA, which we may refer to as simply EBITDA during this call. A reconciliation of these metrics to the most relevant GAAP measures can be found in the appendix of the earnings presentation posted on our website. Finally, the guidance in this presentation is only effective as of today. In general, we will not update guidance until the following quarter and will not update or affirm guidance other than through broadly disseminated public disclosure. I'll now turn the call over to Mike Sabel.

Thank you, Ben. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We are pleased to share our third quarter 2026 results. I will begin the call with an overview of our key accomplishments in the quarter and an update on the business. I will then make some remarks on the LNG industry.

Before turning the call over to Jack, who will provide a more detailed review of our financial results as well as updated guidance for 2026. Following all prepared remarks, we'll open the call to Q&A. Beginning on page 5, you can see several highlights for the quarter, including the company's largest ever quarterly EBITDA of $2.6 billion to $10.3 billion. We are also raising the low end of the expected cargo range by 9 cargoes for 2026. Turning to base mix, our operational and financial performance was very strong in the third quarter.

And the capstone of the operational execution occurred on October 31 as we commenced commercial operations at (inaudible) Phase 1. The team delivered COD within the original window period of our Phase 1 contracts and is now loaded since COD. Although this milestone occurred after the end of the third quarter, we wanted to highlight the significant achievement and recognize our (inaudible) commenced commercial operations just 53 months after FID, making it the fastest greenfield project of its size to progress from FID to COD and surpassing the record previously set by Calcasieu Pass. Commercial momentum continued in the third quarter, as we executed 1.5 MTPA of payments. We are pleased to add ConocoPhillips as a new customer with a 1 million-ton per annum agreement, along with a new offtake agreement with China Gas for 0.5 MTPA.

Additionally, just last week, one of our existing high credit quality customers increased their contracted volume by 0.5 MTPA. (inaudible) for up to 16 power islands and associated grid equipment enabling us to develop an island mode data center solution as a natural extension of our LNG business, building upon our LNG and power expertise to create the first industrial AI utility offering. We believe our existing ability to deliver near-term power turnkey in-house engineering, procurement and construction and manage significant volatility in power loads without relying on the public grid can provide a differentiated and actionable solution for compute providers. Importantly, the agreement framework preserves Venture Global's flexibility on the timing and scope of future developments. Also, any potential AI utility development would be separate from and complementary to Venture Global's existing LNG operations and would not impact the company's LNG sales agreements or other existing commercial commitments.

The production and delivery of low-cost, clean American LNG for the next several decades remained our key strategic objective. Moving to page 7, we are completing Phase 1 commissioning and rectification activities at Plaquemines, which did modestly impact production during the quarter. Moving into the fourth quarter, as anticipated, we have already seen an improvement in production. We'll provide further 2027 production and pricing guidance. As we now expect production there begin midyear 2027.

Taking a closer look at CP2 on page 8. Construction continues to progress, and we are moving for the target of first LNG (inaudible) record of 29 months from FID official during this period have historically tight global LNG. For reference, Plaquemines produced 234 cargoes in its first year of operations. Building on lessons learned at that facility, we believe CP2 can ramp production and even more quickly. On page 9, we discuss our (inaudible) the 10 expansion in early 2027.

Got it. For the (inaudible) to provide have surged by 45%. Yet even with increased LNG imports, inventory builds have lagged typical levels as EU gas to offset variability from other sources of electricity. Severe droughts led to lower reverse wind power represents approximately 20% of Europe's electricity generation (inaudible) well for volatile wind conditions with Asia, any markets looking to manage geopolitical risk have increased coal consumption as an alternative to buying spot LNG. The switching last relief offset roughly of the global supply starting production in July.

Venture Global's LNG projects will continue to offset potential broader supply disruptions, support global demand and nothing illustrates this more clearly than continued in the case of Venture Global, I think it is fair to characterize demand for long-term contracts is stronger than it has ever been long-term fixed margin Henry Hub-linked LNG at prices that make electricity to a market cycles. Turning to page 14. As announced earlier in October, we entered a power frame agreement with GE 16 Power Island units. Each island has gas turbines steam turbine generators, which gives us about 720 megawatts of combined. We have also entered a second frame agreement with GE Grid Solutions for associated gas-insulated switch systems, power transformer and equipment necessary inherent to compute.

These new frame agreements provide for incremental power supply optionality above beyond the remaining equipment available under our long-term Baker Hughes as supply of offtake contracts with investment-grade customers. We have the option to build out further power data center necessary contributing layers infrastructure energy. We believe our ability to provide both on an integrated basis can offer a differentiated turnkey solution at scale. We view this as additive to our current LNG business and is a natural extension of what acres of land and access to roughly 13 Bcf per day of pipeline capacity, making us 1 of the largest gas buyers in the country. We have over 4 gigawatts of power currently operating or in development on our own private grid and 1,000-person in-house execution in EPC team.

We've built ports and fabrication yards develop supply chain and quality control data centers place heightened demand and power Systems or load is not steady. Power demand can rise or fall sharply, which creates a real reliability challenge for most power providers, necessitating utility-grade connectivity to manage this volatility. Venture Global's design is built to meet this volatility challenge as our industrial energy grid already reliably absorbed significant load swings in island mode and our liquefaction facility operations today for potential customers Bypass and interconnectivity hurdles. Venture Global's utility would have no added cost to local consumers. Our solution is designed for reliability with a target of greater than 99.9% uptime supported by multiple layers of redundancy.

We can achieve this with no impact from the local community. This is a natural fit with our existing construction program, which should be -- they support see that this is a low-risk, high-value differentiated market offering. We are working hard to secure commercial agreements and are excited about the opportunity to deploy a unique combination of experience, skills infrastructure, equipment and capital in this rapidly growing market that needs partners capable of delivering this one-stop turnkey offering. I will now turn the call over to our CFO, Jack Thayer, who will review the quarterly performance provide an overview of our project performance and discuss our updated and financial guidance.

Thank you, Mike, and good morning to those of you on the line. I'll be starting on the (inaudible) during this call Six, a $1.4 billion or 43% increase from $3.3 billion during the equivalent period in 2025. This increase was driven by $827 million from higher sales volumes with 466 TBtu in the third quarter of 2026 compared with 373 TBtu in the third quarter of 2025. And $80 million from higher net LNG sales prices with $10.16 per MMBtu earned in Q3 2026 compared with $8.92 per MMBtu earned in Q3 2025. Our income from operations was $2.3 billion in the third quarter of 2026, and a $1 billion or 74% increase from $1.3 billion in the third quarter of 2025.

The improvement was primarily driven by higher sales volumes and prices. Operating and maintenance costs increased $58 million year-over-year, primarily due to increased commissioning work at Plaquemines and expenses related to the ramp-up of operations and readiness at CP2. G&A expenses increased slightly year-over-year, attributable to higher headcount. Our development costs were lower than in the same period last year because as similar to last quarter, we were able to capitalize more costs associated with our pipeline and bolt-on expansions. Our net income attributable to common stockholders, which we refer to as net income was $2.5 billion for the third quarter of 2026, a $2.1 billion or 493% increase from $429 million in Q3 2025.

Again, the most impactful driver of higher net income was increased volume and prices. But in the quarter, we also recognized a $1.4 billion noncash gain on interest rate swaps, which was slightly offset by higher income tax expense. Shifting to consolidated adjusted EBITDA, we earned $2.6 billion during the third quarter of 2026, a $1.1 billion or 69% increase from $1.5 billion in Q3 2025. This increase was driven primarily by higher sales volumes as well as higher LNG sales prices, net of the cost of feed gas. Similar to last quarter, our EBITDA margin was once again 54% and as higher volumes and better pricing were not accompanied by commensurate increases in costs.

In September, we secured a new $3 billion revolving credit facility for general corporate purposes, including to fund early project costs at the CP2 and Plaquemines bolt-on expansions. Through September, we also utilized project distributions to repay $1.8 billion of CP2 Phase I equity bridge drawn capacity. We expect to repay the remaining $0.2 billion balance of the $3 billion facility in Q4 2026. Bolstering our liquidity, we also finished the quarter with $5.1 billion of cash and restricted cash. As you can see on page 18, we are providing a consolidated adjusted EBITDA guidance range of $10 billion to $10.3 billion for 2026, which is up from $8.7 billion to $9.1 billion when we reported in August.

This range contemplates a current market liquefaction fee of $21 to $22 per MMBtu for cargoes remaining to be sold in 2026. On average, if the fixed liquefaction fees over the remainder of 2026 increase or decrease by $1 per MMBtu, we expect our consolidated adjusted EBITDA range to adjust accordingly by $20 million to $30 million reflecting an LNG portfolio where 99% of our expected 2026 cargoes are now contracted. We plan on providing 2027 EBITDA guidance on our next quarterly earnings call. It is worth reminding you all that there will be an impact to contracted Phase 1 margins from the start of our long-term contracts at Plaquemines. We also expect continued basis impact on the gas used at that facility and there are likely to be some costs associated with ramping up the startup of CP2 and the development of our AI utility business.

Given the positive market backdrop and our progress on CP2 construction we're optimistic about another year of strong results. I'll now turn the call back over to Mike.

Thank you, Jack. At this point, we'd like to open up the call for Q&A.

(Operator Instructions) Praneeth Satish, Wells Fargo.

Maybe can you walk us through how quickly CP2 ramps after first LNG? I guess looking at your full year 2027 guidance, it implies a big step-up in the fourth quarter of 27%. Just trying to figure out how much of that is seasonality versus the CP1 debottleneck versus the CP2 ramp. So just anything on the slope of production at CP1 would be helpful.

Sure. The best guide is to look at the ramp-up for Plaquemines, which in the script we just read here we reminded that we produced 234 cargoes in the first 12 months for Plaquemines. We studied as we do very carefully, the opportunities to improve on that. And we think there are opportunities for improving the ramp-up for CP2 relative to Plaquemines. But that ramp-up for Plaquemines, we view as a really good baseline opportunity. So the given the massive scale of CP2, we think the opportunity there is significant.

Mike, we also will see some improvement at Calcasieu Pass in the fourth quarter. as we benefit from debottlenecking that we're doing there during the summer in the summer, yes.

Got it. That's helpful. And maybe switching gears to the power side. So obviously, a big opportunity for you guys. But can you just help us understand how you're thinking about financing for the first set of power islands. And really, it's on the debt side. I guess we've seen financing costs widen for some of the data center projects where they don't yet have customers fully committed. And so -- do you think that is a risk to the pace of your build-out and maybe point to something of a more measured build-out as you wait on customers? Or do you think the economics are still strong even with an increase in financing costs?

The margins are still fantastic even with higher financing costs, assuming that we're able to contract on a triple-net lease basis in line with where others are contracting in the market. When you look at the timing of the first compute that we think is possible to bring on matching with the delivery schedules of the equipment is late '28, early '29. And so it's out a couple of years and that we're looking to build in 250-megawatt compute building increments and then ramping up after over the course of '29 and into 2030. So there's a reasonably gentle ramp-up in what that cost would look like that spreads into really mostly into '29 and 2030, which matches up nicely with the big ramp-up in cash generation by the LNG business. So we think that timing is going to turn out to be well suited for the buildup in cash that we expect as we as we more than double the production capacity, bringing online CP2 and the first bolt-on for CP2 and the first bolt-on of Plaquemines.

The first power plants, we'll begin to place some orders for those as we've guided to shortly. But the payments for the power plants are spread out over a few years as we -- as those get built, we believe we purchased them at a great price. We haven't disclosed the individual prices of the power plants, but we believe we purchased them at a great price that makes them very attractive economically. The first power plant we can deploy into the bolt-on expansion area for and so we think we have a really nice kind of optionality on how we take advantage of the value from the power plants. Again, we think the market, particularly for -- we know the market for power plants that deliver in the next few years is extremely attractive.

Just given the demand of hyperscalers and utilities, not just in the U.S. but globally chasing power generation equipment.

John McKay, Goldman Sachs.

Maybe picking up on that last question a little bit, but just thinking about the remaining LNG build-out -- can you just remind us the capital you need to fund the remaining 85 MTPA? And then any kind of guidance you can give us on kind of the cash generation you'd expect to make over that period? Just trying to think of completing the LNG build-out as you kind of make this shift into the data center side.

Sure. So the next financing is going to be for the bolt-on for CP2 Phase III, which is adding 12 LNG trains and approximately 10 million tons of additional production capacity. The financings are going to look generally similar to what we've done, which will be a combination of bank construction debt at the project level and other debt facilities at the project level, a little bit of contributed equity from cash equity from the parent and -- we do not expect to raise any parent level equity or debt like has been the case for the previous transactions. The bolt-on for Plaquemines, we're guiding to the first half of next year. The first phase of that is adding 8 trains.

So it's a little bit fewer trains in the next phase for the bolt-on for Plaquemines. And that number of trains matches up nicely with how it integrates with the balance of plant for Phases 1 and 2 at Plaquemines. And so that financing sequence, we expect to have done by the middle of next year. before we begin to shift over to the financings for the build-out of the AI compute opportunity. Again, provided we're signing customer contracts to match up with that growth. The cumulative EBITDA from today for '27, '28, '29 is significant.

And my view is that it's going to, in aggregate, be in excess of $30 billion, depending on your price assumption on the sale of cargoes in the future. And so we have significant retained earnings accumulation that supports the LNG build-out plus any incremental equity to support financing for contracted data center buildings and also amortization of debt and a nice cash cushion. Today, if you took note from a few minutes ago, Jack, showed that we have today, $5.3 billion of cash. And so while we've been growing our business significantly in the last year, adding $18 billion of assets and increase in production capacity. We've also been able to manage the cash balance attractively.

Mike. I appreciate that. And maybe just thinking about the LNG build-out but pulling the macro in a little bit. Can you just share some of your thoughts on what the contracting environment looks like right now, we've seen a new buyer come into the U.S. contract market that's a little different from what we've seen before. So any kind of thoughts you can share on the general contracting environment and what your appetite to sign new long-term deals is right now?

Yes. No. It's an extremely attractive 20-year, active market for us right now, probably as good as we've seen since the beginning. And we're expecting to sign more 20-year deals this year and next year. The market has shifted to for the moment at least to more buyers coming from Asia than Europe, which is a pivot from the last couple of years, 1 than what we expected, but as a ride now. We feel good that we'll be able to layer into the portfolio, the additional 20-year SPAs that we want. And we also think that we'll see increasing appetite for midterm deals as well, 5-year deals. And so we'll probably look to add some of those next year as well.

Spiro Dounis, Citi.

I want to just follow up actually on that last question with respect to contracting activity. Mike, you maybe level set us on what's still needed to commercialize the next expansions at Calcasieu Pass and Plaquemines. And the slide points you about 30 TPA still available. Just wanted to get your sense on how you're thinking about what that looks like post FID and how much you'd be willing to contract out.

We're in a good position to finance today what we need to -- where we already have what we need to do the FID for the CP2 bolt-on. And it's a brownfield expansion. We expect to be able to turn that incremental million or 10 trains that are inside the wall for the Phase III fairly quickly. And so it creates extra opportunities for how we finance that project. We expect and plan to have more this year, some of which will be assigned to that bolt-on expansion and others that will shift over to the Plaquemines bolt-on for the Plaquemines bolt-on, we could finance that one ahead of additional 20-year deals. But given the cadence of our activity, we would -- we expect to have two or three more or more to support the timing of the FID for Plaquemines.

We expect to have all of that contracted on a multiyear basis, a 5- to 20-year basis is probably the likely range. We have a heavily weighted portfolio today, heavily weighted to 20-year deals. So our overall portfolio length is really long. And we'd like to add more midterm deals, so we can add more price and still end up with a very long term. So of that remaining 30 million tons out of the -- I can't remember what page number that has been. But out of the 85 we have coming online in the next few years, those will be done on a blend of 5-year deals, 10-year deals, 20-year deals, 2-year deals that we have a few years to blend those contracts in. We're not going to rush out and do them all in the next few months and quarters. We'll spread them out to leg in to kind of a blended term. If we did half of that on a midterm basis, we're still going to have a contract length that's 13, 14, 15 years in term, is still a long life portfolio.

Got it. Appreciate the color on that. Switching gears back over to the power side and just to focus on the power returns, I guess. And not sure I'm not sure you say right now, but can you talk about the relative returns on power and how that compares to LNG and where some of those trade-offs might be? And similarly, is there an easy way to think about the unit economics and CapEx on each of these 250-megawatt units?

So the returns, if we just did power and didn't also build the data centers might be a little bit higher, but we wouldn't be deploying that much capital the returns on a combined basis of power plus data center buildings is higher than the returns on the LNG side. provided that we're contracting in line with where others are contracting in the market. It's not an either or though. We're going to continue building the and we're going to build out our grids in order to support data center demand -- so we think it's a very attractive addition again, if we're able to execute the triple-net lease contracts. And we think that it will provide a really nice kind of a blend of contracts that are also long term, but don't have the same commodity price exposure. And so as we layer those contracts in, it will it will blend out that volatility and we think be very attractive for shareholders.

Manav Gupta, UBS.

I'm trying to understand, as I look at the slide 24, what is, in your opinion, the optimal mix of contracted versus uncontracted capacity as you are trying to enter a new year. So let's say, where would you like to be somewhere in December 2027 and then again December 2028. As you enter those years, what would be the right mix of contracted versus uncontracted capacity?

So not all the volume, obviously, in these charts exists today. It's -- and we think that wouldn't be smart to do. And so we have time to blend in the contracts. We have over 50 million tons of contracts today, almost all on a 20-year basis. And so we have room in our portfolio to capture more price by doing shorter than 20-year deals. And so we expect the vast majority of this to all be contracted in the next couple of years, but we'd like to do more midterm deals to blend down the 20-year term and hopefully achieve a higher price in the market today, as I'm sure you know, as you go shorter, in contracted term, the prices are higher. And we have room to add a decent amount of midterm deals, and it still have a very long portfolio of contract term. It's difficult to give an exact blend today where we're going to be a year from now and 2 years from now because we don't know the market price to be able to do it.

And obviously, we're always reacting to the market price. We think that the fundamentals that are true in most commodity markets will continue to be the case here, which is replacement cost drives the market price over time. And we think that construction costs are going to continue to inflate we think that interest rates are more likely to stay the same or go higher than go lower in the next couple of years. And that signals higher replacement costs. And so we think over a multiyear period supports increasing price opportunity that we want to blend into over time.

Perfect. Sir, my quick follow-up is on the power side. A lot of companies are trying this. I'm trying to understand from Venture Global's perspective, what are the strategic advantages that your company has? Why would you feel that the data centers would like to partner with you? What advantages can you bring to the table versus some of the multiple solutions that are out there?

Sure. Well, the one of the big challenges that exist in the compute market today is really the scarcity of electricity being available to power the building is going to compute. And a big part of that is the ability or the difficulty in connecting to utility grids as they have in the past. And is political and regulatory. And the other component of it is the ability to manage the scale and variability of the compute loads as the compute utilization goes up and down sometimes in milliseconds.

So the market and response, as we've all seen over this year is to start to build power plants separate from the utility grids and contribute that power to the grid. The data centers largely remain connected to the grids in parallel to connecting with the incremental power which means that they continue to use throughput capacity in the transmission lines and the grids of the utilities, which we think will remain to be a large impediment to the growth of the market. In our case, we have developed over many years and built and now operate multi-gigawatt grids that manage the variable load of our LNG facilities and have demonstrated to be very reliable in managing that variability and providing high-quality power for in our case, LNG production. And so for us, we can expand our existing grids to provide significantly increased power generation combined with data center buildings to support the compute demand all in island mode. So we're not connecting and reliant on the utility grids.

We have no impact on the communities' grids or available power generation or prices, and we're not reliant on the water utilities either. So in an environment where we think that's 1 of the primary challenges to growth. We think we solved entirely. We also have built out as you know, our own execution team. The engineers procures builds commissions and operates these complex electrical grids.

And so we think it's including gas supply. And so we think it enables us to be a turnkey solution on 2 of the kind of layers of the AI ecosystem energy and infrastructure and provide very, very high-quality product for the hyperscaler customers.

Jean Salisbury, Bank of America.

I know it's early, but do the midterm election results affect how you see the power frame opportunity and the geographic areas that you're targeting, which from slide 14 looks like it's basically all Louisiana. And could you actually see Louisiana potentially gain market share in data centers from this?

Yes. We think Louisiana has a significant advantage in the market. For the moment, it seems like they might be the only store open on Sunday here for data centers. And combined with our offering, which is island mode, we think that it creates a significant scarcity value at scale for how we can execute this. It appears that the other states are going to take a while to kind of decide what they want the new rules to be for expanding power data centers and compute and Louisiana, particularly with what we've already executed and how large an investor we are today in Louisiana is open for business, and we think Louisiana has a great opportunity to significantly add to their existing gas businesses in the state and become a major supplier of compute in the United States.

That makes sense. And then a follow-up on slide 14. Thank you for the split of your outlook for the power generation business into Cameron Parish versus Plaquemines. Currently, there's some pretty severe gas constraints going into Plaquemines, Parish which I guess would just get worse if you add a power and Plaquemines bolt-ons. Do you think that you need to see pipelines come in to fix those constraints before you'll be able to really get customers to sign up there?

Jean, this is Jack. So importantly, there are 2 pipes that are coming online in 2028 that we'll address some of that constraint that we have been seeing in our basis projections. But I would add that the Cloud Connector pipe that Mike announced in his prepared remarks is really an avenue for us to secure significant gas. That pipeline will ultimately go up to Perryville. And you've seen increasingly improved connectivity heading west to east as projects have been announced that look to develop not just the Permian assets and the gas associated with them coming over, but also the development of the Western Haynesville and Shelby Trough and that gas coming over as well. I'd also note that production within Haynesville has been incredibly high volumes in what has been a low price environment. That's always viewed as the most price-sensitive market. but we see developers and upstream producers earning attractive returns in a low price environment, and we expect them to continue to maintain their production and in fact, grow their production as new demand comes online.

Chris Robertson, Deutsche Bank.

Just First question on the Power Island AI side. I think the power offering is pretty clear. But can you talk more about the additional infrastructure offering that you guys will be providing, including some buildings and other design elements. And can you talk about, was this engineering work already done in-house? Or are you still developing plans around that?

Sure. No, the infrastructure offering is really just the data center buildings in combination with the integrated power. That's the bulk of that. Obviously, it includes cooling systems as well. The -- there's an envelope inside the building where we hand off to the customers of the compute. And again, we're when we sign these, we're signing triple-net leases on the power buildings.

And so the envelope inside is going to depend on who the customers end up being and we're building our target is to build incrementally 250-megawatt compute buildings. And so we have we have room to have multiple customers between buildings, if that's how it turns out. And so it's possible there would be different designs within the buildings. We manage as we build on the LNG infrastructure side, teams of multiple subcontractors and the it will be similar for the data center buildings where we tap into specialist contracting firms that provide different aspects of the construction and engineering for specialized systems, and that's exactly the same way we do it at a larger scale on the LNG side.

But the power systems, we're very familiar with, which are the gas-insulated switch buildings, the e-houses, the transformers and the power generation itself is nearly identical, we'll be adding layers of batteries and aeroderivatives, but we, in our LNG facilities, networks of battery systems and aeroderivatives as well designed to manage variable load. So is very similar.

That's clear. Maybe one for Jack or Mike, you could probably answer this as well. But 2027 will be the first full year of commercial operations at both CP as well as Plaquemine in terms of the base production. So can you talk about maybe expectations around what percentage of full year EBITDA or revenues for 2027 will be derived from the contract agreements versus any spot or commissioning volumes?

In terms of -- Chris, in terms of 2027, the split will be given that Phase 2 will come online the middle of next year for Plaquemines in COD format, and those contracts will start we'd still anticipate that the prevailing market prices will be the major driver of our earnings and EBITDA during 2027. And that forward curve looks attractive at current prices. And as we play through the winter here, we anticipate that bow waving into '27 as Europe, in particular, addresses storage shortfall. I would pause and think about the data we talked about earlier in the call, which is the ramp-up for the first 12 months of Plaquemines was 234 cargoes. And how hard we've worked kind of looking for opportunities to make improvements in that ramp-up schedule. And obviously, the guidance we just gave to vectoring towards a July 1st LNG date and so it's a pretty significant move moving the first LNG date from the winter into the summer there to the middle of the year.

Elvira Scotto, RBC Capital Markets.

You talked a little bit about this already, but with the new AI data center initiative, obviously, given your expertise in power, this seems to make a lot of sense. But how should we think about capital allocation. How are you deploying human and other resources to LNG versus power? And what are the latest thoughts on that sort of getting to investment grade in light of this new business? And then just capital return to shareholders?

So those are a lot of great questions. So first of all, in terms of resource timing, we're actually getting ready to come off peak at CP2 already, which when you think about our guidance on when we're going to get to first LNG would be expected and so in the bolt-on at CP1, a lot of that activity happens at the factory, the incremental 12 LNG trains, the first bolt-on train is going to be the 91st train that we commissioned and turn on. And that's being built over in Italy and they'll roll over and slide on to foundations, the power plant we ordered a long time ago. It's a similar power plant. We have very little pipe rack for this Phase III.

So when you compare and then the Plaquemines bolt-on looks like it's going to just trail by about 6 months and that's 8 trains in the first phase of that. So it's a very manageable execution that kind of just staples on to the remaining activity. And the big ramp-up for the data centers, again, if and when we sign offtake contracts, happens really more some mid-28, but really more '29 and '30 and so it gives us a great scope to apply this amazing team, this giant team that we've built that has, we think, an amazing set of skills and capacity. And so from an execution allocation, perspective, this lens in really nicely with the kind of the tapering of the most intense LNG construction and commissioning activity. That lag in timing also plays very nicely into the deployment of capital, again, as if we're able to sign triple-net leases that capital requirement pushes out into '29 and '30.

The 250-megawatt buildings, the rest of the industry build those today kind of in the $5 billion, $6 billion, $7 billion range, not including the chips. And so our -- and we're going to do this if we're able to do this with investment-grade counterparties. And so the incremental capital requirements for those are manageable relative to our size, particularly out in 28, 29, 30 as we're significantly ramping up production and cash flows. We load give or take, 3 cargoes a month now and 24 months from now, that will pass 90 a month. And so we have a very significant buildup of cash.

And we think it's a really nice way to deploy a lot of extra capital that we think actually will improve our path to investment grade as we increase contracted long-term sales of the triple-net leases. And hopefully significantly increase our generation and earnings. But we have, in coming years, cumulatively tens of billions of dollars of cash generation. And so we have plenty of room to manage investment grade at project levels and at the parent level, pay down debt and buy back stock if we think the stock price remains attractive and too low from our perspective.

Great. And then just in terms of -- I mean, I know you announced this recently, but presumably, you've been working on this for a while. But can you give us a sense of just the appetite from hyperscalers. Have you already started having discussions with some counterparties. And then what's the sort of typical lead time from customer commitment to revenue commencement?

So we've been working on this for 7 to 8 months now. And only announced it recently as we executed, I think, 3 weeks ago now, the expansion of the frame agreement with GE. And we really needed to have that in place to have the most serious conversations with potential customers because the scarcity in the market has been the ability to actually acquire the near-term power generation equipment and the switch gear and transformers. And so that needs to be in place for not just us but any counterparty to closeout deals with customers on specific schedules -- we've never -- on the prediction and timing, we've never signed a triple-net lease before.

So we're not experts on predicting the timing of those. We've done, give or take, $140 billion of long-term contracts with LNG customers. So we're able to give you better predictions on that side. And so we want to remain very conservative on comments on timing. We know we can execute it. We now know we've secured the supply chain to match up with our execution capacity. We have room to do it. We permitted for years, similar infrastructure in our locations. We're in a great state to do it. We have the capital capacity to do it, but we haven't signed the deals yet. And so that's what we're working on.

We've reached the end of the Q&A session. I will now turn the call back to Mike Sabel, CEO, Executive Co-Chairman and Founder for closing remarks.

Great. Thanks for everyone's time this morning. We are extremely pleased with the progress that we made this quarter. We're hard at work safely executing our current construction and growth projects. And look forward to speaking to many of you in coming days and weeks and are excited for our next quarterly call already. So thanks, everybody. Have a great day.

- This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.