Yesterday, at Entergy’s Investor Day at the New York Stock Exchange, the utility’s executives walked on stage alongside some unusual guests: representatives from both Meta and AWS.
Nat Sahlstrom, vice president of energy and sustainability at Meta, noted how remarkable his presence was: “We have two energy infrastructure folks from cloud companies sitting at the New York Stock Exchange, sharing anecdotes about our experience with an IOU. Fifteen years ago, that would have been unheard of.”
Back then, data centers were 10-megawatt facilities hosted in “converted chocolate chip cookie factories,” and energy was plentiful, he continued. Today, though, energy has “become the critical feedstock into cloud and AI infrastructure.”
What was also remarkable, in my view, was the fact that the utility and its hyperscaler customers presented themselves to investors as a united front. The latter were essentially acting as salespeople for Entergy’s stock. It’s the latest example of the increasingly tight collaboration between utilities and hyperscalers — a collaboration that, I should note before getting into the nuances of their business relationship, is potentially uncomfortable for the many people concerned about utility priorities as bills increase across much of the U.S.
That said, both Meta and AWS have taken such big bets in Entergy’s service territory that perhaps their presence shouldn’t be a surprise.
AWS’s planned investment in Mississippi is $25 billion. And Meta is building a five-gigawatt data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana — a campus so large that “it stretches as far as you can see,” and represents a $50-billion investment in partnership with Entergy, Sahlstrom said. (Bloomberg reported that Meta intends to spend a baseline of $200 billion on the campus).
In turn, Entergy’s growth is fueled by these investments. The utility’s retail sales growth outlook went from the 4%–5% range in 2024 to 9% today, with most of the growth coming from industrial customer demand. Its five-year capital plan went from $33 billion to $67 billion.
According to a Jefferies note to clients, Louisiana “is the single largest driver of the story,” with the state’s rate base doubling from $24 billion in 2026 to nearly $50 billion in 2030, thanks largely to the generation, transmission, and storage being built to support Meta’s campus, which represents “a capital request above $15 billion with about $14 billion in the four-year Plan.”
Meta is funding a “meaningful portion” of these expenses, according to Jefferies, through construction contributions, a twenty-year service agreement, a parent guarantee, and minimum monthly payments.
This points to two interesting things in Entergy’s presentation: its “Fair Share Plus” pledge, and the way it says it will fund its $67 billion capital plan. As Andrew Marsh, Entergy CEO, explained, the former matches the “ratepayer protection pledge” a non-binding agreement by large tech companies to pay for the cost of the energy infrastructure needed to support their data centers, which was secured by the White House in March.
Under Entergy’s Fair Share Plus pledge, data center revenues will cover the incremental cost of service and a share of fixed costs, which the utility estimates will result in around $7 billion in customer savings over the 15- to 20-year lives of the contracts, based on existing electric service agreements.
Kimberly Fontan, Entergy’s executive VP and CFO, explained at Investor Day that the pledge was one of three pillars of the utility’s contracting strategy with hyperscalers; the other two are that the the hyperscaler will support the utility’s credit health, and that it will get its “clean attributes” from Entergy.
Entergy expects hyperscaler contributions to be a big part of its $67-billion five-year capital plan; roughly $38 billion of that total will come from what Fontan describes as “strong cash from operations,” thanks in part to how the contracts with hyperscalers are structured. Only $7 billion would be equity, which is “much lower than most utilities in the space,” as one analyst pointed out during the presentation.
This last point seems to at least partially answer the market’s biggest question: Where do utilities find the money to pay for the AI infrastructure buildout?
In March, AES answered that question by agreeing to be acquired by BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners and EQT, in a $33.4 billion take-private. And last month, NextEra and Dominion announced they were merging, betting on scale and a larger balance sheet to support growth, and — as Caroline Golin, chief growth and policy officer at NRG, said on the latest episode of the Open Circuit podcast — to expand NextEra’s regulated book.
Entergy, meanwhile, seems to be betting that the hyperscalers will pay. And while most of the needed infrastructure has yet to be built, it’s significant that some of the biggest tech companies in the world are willing to come onstage and pitch that plan to investors themselves.
A version of this story was published in the AI-Energy Nexus newsletter on June 10, 2026. Subscribe to get pieces like this — plus expert analysis, original reporting, and curated resources — in your inbox every Wednesday.
