The U.S. is about to churn out much more natural gas to power AI and to export—and it’s triggering a wave of multibillion-dollar acquisitions

It’s shopping season for America’s pipeline giants.

As they prepare for a wave of new U.S. natural gas production to power AI data centers or for export overseas, the top pipeline players are quickly buying up their smaller private competitors to consolidate the industry and build out scale.

This week, Tulsa-based Oneok bought West Texas’s Brazos Midstream’s Permian Basin assets for $4.42 billion. This comes shortly after pipeline giant Williams acquired Momentum Midstream and its Texas and Louisiana pipeline gathering and processing facilities for $5.5 billion. In May, Western Midstream paid $1.6 billion for Brazos’s Delaware Basin facilities in the western lobe of the Permian.

In the 20 years of the U.S. shale gas boom since 2006, U.S. natural gas production has more than doubled—following over three decades of flat output—and is projected to continue skyrocketing through 2050. The U.S. now produces about a quarter of the world’s natural gas—almost double the output of second-place Russia—and leads the world in liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, even though the U.S. only started shipping LNG 10 years ago.

The continued build-out of LNG export facilities in Texas and Louisiana, coupled with surging domestic demand to power AI, means that U.S. natural gas output could rise another 35% from now until...