The Southern Company

The Southern Company is an American electric and natural gas utility holding company that generates, transmits, and distributes electricity to roughly 9 million customers across the Southeast and distributes natural gas to more than 4 million customers across four states, producing $29.6 billion in total operating revenues in fiscal 2025. Its principal regulated electric subsidiaries — Georgia Power, Alabama Power, and Mississippi Power — operate in vertically integrated, state-regulated markets that give the company uncommon control over generation, transmission, and distribution in one of the fastest-growing regions of the United States.

This is a story about a century-old regulated utility that has become, almost overnight, one of the most direct beneficiaries of the artificial-intelligence buildout. Southern Company's Southeast service territory sits at the center of hyperscaler data-center demand, and the company has contracted more than 10 gigawatts of large-load agreements — roughly the equivalent of adding a midsize utility's entire generation fleet — with protective terms designed to keep existing customers harmless. The file turns on a single question: whether the company can execute on $81 billion of capital spending over five years while preserving the rate stability, credit quality, and regulatory compact that have defined it for decades.