From Edison to the AI age: inside GE Vernova’s reinvention and 600% stock spike
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Good morning. The company Thomas Edison helped found in 1892 to light up the world is now betting its future on powering the AI age. As GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik told me recently, “For us, our true north is to electrify the world. And if we electrify the world, we will decarbonize the world.”
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GE Vernova’s equipment and technology are used to generate about 25% of the world’s electricity, whether it’s gas, wind, steam, hydro, or nuclear energy. It also produces equipment and software for power grids. (Shawn Tully recently wrote about GE’s turnaround and its split into three entities: GE Vernova is No. 124 on the Fortune 500, GE Aerospace is No. 101, and GE Healthcare is No. 217.) Since GE Vernova became an independent public company in April 2024, the stock is up more than 600%.
But behind those incredible numbers is a deliberate strategy: Strazik has successfully pivoted to new growth areas, in part by turning new customers such as NVIDIA and nuclear-energy startup Blue Energy into R&D partners. In an era of accelerating speed and complexity of transformation, that’s a playbook worth studying.
“The technical hurdle with how they want to run AI factories is much more complex than our standard‑fare offering, and that’s great,” said Strazik. “What I see happening is a lot of the technology we’re developing to help them … will ultimately apply to the broader grid over time. But they will have funded a lot of the learning curve.”
Strazik appreciates but is not sentimental about the past, noting that “25% of our employees today weren’t part of the company the day we spun. They don’t even know GE.” The same is true for customers, 25% of whom only started buying from the company after it spun off, he added: “Technology companies that historically were not buying directly from us have become critical customers and strategic partners.”
What Strazik thinks about is not just the technology but talent: “We need kids that get excited about building stuff, because we need to build a lot of stuff in the next decade.”
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com