Duke Energy Corporation

Duke Energy Corporation is an American regulated electric and gas utility holding company serving approximately 8.7 million customers across six states — North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky — through a portfolio of fully regulated utilities that generated $32.2 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025. The company operates the largest regulated nuclear fleet in the United States, 11 reactors across six sites, and has embarked on the industry's largest fully regulated capital plan at $103 billion through 2030, positioning it at the intersection of electric load growth, the energy transition, and one of the most consequential infrastructure build cycles in American utility history.

This is a story about a regulated monopoly operating in states that are winning the economic development race. Duke's service territories in the Carolinas and Indiana are attracting hyperscale data center commitments at a pace that has transformed the company's growth profile from a steady 4-6% rate base compounder into something closer to a 9-10% infrastructure build. The central tension is whether the regulatory compact — customers fund the build, shareholders earn on it — can survive the sheer scale of what's coming. Duke's management argues it can, pointing to $5 billion in customer-benefit tools, contractual protections that make new large loads pay their fair share, and a century-long track record of keeping rates below the national average. The counterargument is that no amount of mitigation changes the arithmetic of a $103 billion capital plan in an environment where every utility bill increase is political kindling. The file turns on whether Duke can simultaneously be the country's most ambitious builder and its most disciplined cost manager.