The AES Corporation

The AES Corporation is an American global power generation and electric utility holding company that owns and operates approximately 34,740 megawatts of generating capacity across ten countries and distributes electricity to roughly 2.7 million customers through six regulated utilities, generating $12.2 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025. Founded in 1981 and headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, AES has spent the last decade transforming from a geographically scattered fleet of fossil-fuel plants into what management calls a "next-generation energy company" — one whose growth is driven almost entirely by long-term contracts to supply renewable power to large corporate customers, principally data center operators.

This is a story about the tension between a genuinely attractive set of growth assets and a balance sheet that the public markets refused to underwrite. In March 2026, a consortium led by BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners and EQT Infrastructure agreed to take AES private in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $33.4 billion, or $15.00 per share — roughly a 40% premium to the stock's late-2025 trough but well below levels the shares commanded as recently as mid-2024. The deal, expected to close in late 2026 or early 2027, is the market's verdict on a fundamental question: can a company that needs to invest $5–7 billion annually in growth capex while carrying $30 billion of debt prosper as a public company?

The core of the file is a simpler question: whether the 12-gigawatt contracted renewables backlog and 11% utility rate base growth are worth materially more than the take-private price implies — or whether the leverage that funded them makes the exit price a fair clearing level. Answering that requires understanding not just the project pipeline but the architecture of AES's financing, the durability of its data center relationships, and what happens to the legacy thermal fleet while the new assets come online.