Nvidia Falls. The Turbine Queue Doesn't.

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia's president, chief executive and director, effective immediately, and by pre-market trading the stock had slid from a high of just under $207 to a bit over $150, PCWorld reported. MINING.COM put the low at $148 on Thursday morning, before a partial recovery left the shares 7.7% weaker on the day.

Across the Atlantic, the people who build the machines that keep AI data centres lit were doing something less dramatic: counting orders. They had a lot to count.

That contrast is the story. A chief executive's departure is a governance event. It can move a share price in an afternoon. What the market is now testing is whether it says anything about the physical demand for electricity, and the first hard evidence says it does not.

A scandal with no operating consequence, so far

Nvidia's board named CFO Colette Kress interim CEO and said she will keep her finance role until a permanent successor is found. It also created the post of chair for the first time, giving it to Harvey C. Jones, and said it will consider internal and external candidates. It has told investors it has "no reason to believe that either national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised," while external investigations are only beginning, per PCWorld. The press release, PCWorld noted, says nothing about Huang's controversies or any role he might keep. Nvidia still plans to report third-quarter fiscal 2027 results on November 17.

The analyst reaction was a trim, not a retreat. MINING.COM reported that BMO Capital Markets cut its price target by 29% to $240 from $340 and removed the company as its top pick, while maintaining its outperform rating. "We remain bullish on [artificial intelligence]; however, the latest scandal is an overhang." wrote BMO's Harsh Kumar. The Robot Report, citing Reuters and Morningstar, added that the departure could slow AI deal-making and invite closer government scrutiny of trade deals.

The order book answers back

Siemens Energy chose this week to report that its order backlog had reached a new record of €164 billion, with a book-to-bill ratio of 1.54. US orders at group level rose 70.8% to €27.7 billion in fiscal 2026. Gas Services orders climbed 45.9% to €32.8 billion, and Grid Technologies grew orders 14.5% to €24.0 billion.

Profit followed. Siemens Energy's margin before special items reached 12.4%, against 6.0% in fiscal 2025, and free cash flow before tax rose to €8.8 billion, helped by customer advance payments and reservation fees. Customers, in other words, are paying to hold a place in line. For fiscal 2027 the company guides to comparable revenue growth of 14% to 16%, and it targets a margin of 20% to 22% by 2030. Shareholders get a proposed dividend of €2.30 per share, against €0.70 a year earlier, plus a buyback of up to €9bn through fiscal 2030.

Reuters reported that the guidance followed a sell-off in AI-related stocks, triggered by fears of tougher regulation after Democratic gains in the US midterms. Siemens Energy shares were up 8.4% at 1023 GMT on Nov. 11. Berenberg analysts called the news "reassuring to the market following the recent sell-off".

CEO Christian Bruch was blunt with journalists. "Demand for electricity for data centres is intact, also going forward." he said. He was also candid about the froth: "Some of the growth rates for data centres were unrealistic, it's just that nobody wanted to hear it."

His own numbers show how much of the book the data centres fill, and how much they don't. Orders for gas turbines and grid equipment tied to data centres come to around €15 billion ($16.8 billion), or 9.1%, of the record €164 billion backlog, Bruch said. That is a large sum. It is also a minority of the book. Grid Technologies, Siemens Energy said, is positioned for an investment cycle in which grids must be expanded, modernized and stabilized well beyond this decade.

Six years in line

Gas turbines are where the bottleneck is physical. Worldwide orders top 100 gigawatts, according to Wood Mackenzie, well above estimated global production capacity, Reuters reported on Nov. 9. In the US, a turbine now takes six years on average to arrive. "Delivery conversations (are) firmly focused on the 2030 to 2031 window," Wood Mackenzie senior analyst Aurora Tenorio told Reuters.

Jefferies analysts estimate that US data centres alone account for nearly 17 GW of turbine demand this year, a figure that can more than triple by 2028. Manufacturing capacity is expected to grow but still falls well short of the 129 GW in expected demand. Siemens Energy, GE Vernova and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which dominate the market, all say the AI boom has pushed orders beyond what they can build, Reuters reported.

Workarounds exist and are hardly cheap. Crusoe ordered 13 aeroderivative turbines from ProEnergy in April, with a joint capacity of 650 megawatts. But Enverus Intelligence Research's Noor Qureshi told Reuters the used-turbine market is "already constrained, with limited excess supply," and that air permits and grid access slow projects too.

What a chip order does not tell you

The hyperscalers' spending is the link between Nvidia's fortunes and this queue, and it is loose. Microsoft invested $45.2 billion, including finance leases, in the quarter ended Sept. 30, and CFO Amy Hood guided to calendar-year spending of about $170 billion on the Oct. 28 call, MINING.COM reported. Alphabet kept its $195-billion to $205-billion forecast for 2026 and expects a significant increase in 2027. Both forecasts predate Huang's exit and could be revised.

The bulk of Microsoft's quarterly spending went to shorter-lived assets, mainly processors. MINING.COM's read: "A dollar cut from a chip order cannot be translated directly into a proportional loss of copper demand." A delay, it added, can shift demand into another year without shrinking the eventual computing capacity.

The power side has independent support. The US Energy Information Administration projects demand rising from a record 4,216 billion kilowatt-hours in 2025 to 4,306 billion kWh in 2026 and 4,370 billion kWh in 2027, Reuters reported, which would make 2026 the third straight year of record demand. Commercial sales are forecast at 1,557 billion kWh in 2026, against an all-time high of 1,503 billion kWh in 2025. The IEA, per MINING.COM, expects data-centre electricity use to roughly double from 485 terawatt-hours in 2025 to 950 by 2030, with grids, energy equipment and chip supply as the constraints.

Bruch's remark about unrealistic growth rates is the caveat that matters. Nobody is arguing that every forecast holds. But a scandal can empty a chief executive's office in an afternoon. It cannot shorten a six-year wait.