Texas and Russia: The Only Real Winners When the Wars End

The mechanism is straightforward. Artificial intelligence and the broader compute build-out consume enormous amounts of electricity. Data centers already account for a rapidly rising share of U.S. power demand, and the International Energy Agency projects that consumption roughly doubles by 2030, with AI-focused facilities growing even faster. Natural gas supplies a large portion of that load in the United States. The current price of energy relative to the productivity gains from AI has looked artificially cheap. That is changing.

Higher fuel and power prices make every query, model training run, and inference more expensive. The offset is the work those systems replace or accelerate. For firms that can capture the productivity jump—logistics, code, analysis, design, materials, weapons design—the net is still positive. Energy producers who can deliver reliable molecules and electrons capture the upside. Places that cannot will simply pay more for less.

Texas sits at the center of that trade. It is the largest U.S. producer of crude and a dominant LNG exporter. European buyers have become major customers for Texas barrels and cargoes precisely because they spent years trying to isolate Russia. Pipeline gas from Russia to Europe has collapsed to multi-decade lows after the Ukrainian transit route closed. Yet the EU continues to take Russian LNG under long-term contracts, even as it accelerates purchases of U.S. volumes. In practical terms, Europe is buying energy that fills the gap left by its own policy choices, while Texas infrastructure and producers bank the revenue. The “Russian energy from Texas” line is not literal; it is the market result of Europe’s attempt to wage economic war on a country larger than the entire EU while still needing the molecules.

Russia has absorbed the sanctions with limited damage to its core. Moscow is not a small coastal state dependent on a single export route. It is the world’s largest country by area, with multiple pipelines, ports, and relationships across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Energy revenues have held up through redirection and higher prices. The EU’s sanctions and bans created friction and higher costs for European industry and households far more than they produced strategic collapse in the Kremlin. Russia retains commercial and intelligence links across ethnic and diaspora networks that no Brussels regulation can sever. The net effect of Europe’s posture has been to damage its own competitiveness and its relationship with both Washington and Moscow at the same time.

That opens a window for the United States. With European dependence on American energy now structural, Washington has leverage it did not fully possess a decade ago. Demonstrating that leverage—through export policy, pricing, and the simple fact that Texas can deliver while others debate—reinforces American weight in global affairs without requiring new military commitments. The same dynamic applies if Iranian export constraints ease or tighten: the marginal barrel and the marginal electron still flow toward producers who can ship them reliably.

The wars themselves will not end cleanly. Ukraine will leave contested territory and reconstruction costs. Iran will still have a nuclear threshold capability and regional proxies. What ends is the period in which European capitals could pretend that energy was a secondary moral issue rather than the foundation of industrial and military power. AI demand makes the arithmetic unavoidable. Compute is power, and power is fuel. Texas produces both. Russia still controls a large share of the global surplus that sets the price. The rest of the world is negotiating the bill.