Forget AI — if you’re looking for growth, check out natural gas

Everybody knows about tech’s fast growers.

And Palantir’s 63% year-over-year Q3 sales growth rate was impressive. So was Robinhood Markets, which saw a 100% sales rise, or AppLovin, at nearly 70% revenue growth.

(Robinhood Markets Inc. is the parent company of Sherwood Media, an independently operated media company subject to certain legal and regulatory restrictions. I own Robinhood stock as part of my compensation.)

But as we turn into the final lap of Q3 earnings season — Nvidia reports its numbers on November 19 and Walmart closes the season on November 20 — natural gas stocks have emerged as some of the most overlooked sources of revenue growth for investors, according to a screen we recently ran using FactSet data.

Expand Energy, created by the merger of Chesapeake and Southwestern last year, is the nation’s largest natural gas producer, and when it posted sales of $2.97 billion in Q3 — up over 350% — late last month, it leapt to the top of the leaderboard for Q3 sales growth, FactSet data shows.

An early US cold snap, strong liquefied natural gas exports from the US to Europe, and doubts about Russian supplies to the world market amid more talk of sanctions and Ukrainian attacks on Russian infrastructure have all helped push up prices for gas.

US benchmarks are up more than 70% over the last 12 months, including a more than 50% gain over the the last three months — and strong demand from power plants competing to churn out energy for the AI data center boom has created a favorable growth backdrop for other gas industry players, from gas pipeline and processing company Oneok, to distributor EQT Corp, to drillers like Diamondback Energy and Coterra Energy.