AEP Adds 28 GW in Four Months to Load Additions Forecast

Just in case you thought a few headlines about project cancellations meant the data center boom is slowing...

The leaders of American Electric Power Co. Inc. have signaled that the company’s capital spending plans will grow significantly after the company has since last fall doubled, to 56 gigawatts, its amount of contracted load additions.

Most of the growth since late October in AEP’s forecast load growth is in Texas, which accounts for about 36 GW of the 56 GW total. Through last fall, customers there had signed on for 13 GW of capacity. Planned projects in Ohio have added 3 GW to the pipeline while customers have contracted for roughly 1 GW in both Oklahoma and Virginia since October.

“We are in the midst of a generational load growth phenomenon,” Chairman, President and CEO Bill Ferhman said on a Feb. 12 conference call discussing AEP’s fourth-quarter results. “These gigawatts are not speculative as they are all backed by signed customer agreements.”

Not surprisingly, data centers (under which AEP also groups cryptocurrency ventures) have accounted for much of the growth in forecast load additions. They now account for 88% of the pipeline compared to 79% in October.

The massive growth in AEP’s forecast will translate into billions more in capital spending but Fehrman and CFO Trevor Mihalik aren’t yet ready to quantify that increase to their 2026-2030 plan worth $72 billion. Mihalik did say on the conference call that the $72 billion figure is “somewhat conservative” and added that AEP teams have since October firmed up generation and transmission projects that will add between $5 billion and $8 billion to the company’s capex plan—spending that isn’t part of the 28 GW increase in contracted load growth.

Included in that more than $5 billion of new projects, Mihalik said, are $2.7 billion worth of transmission projects in the Southwest Power Pool, roughly $1.5 billion of work in PJM territories and about $500 million worth of projects in the MISO planning area.

Retail sales in 2025 rose 7.5% at AEP, which serves 5.6 million customers from eastern Ohio to southwest Texas, lifted by commercial and industrial growth of nearly 10%. That helped grow fourth-quarter revenues by more than 13% to more than $5.3 billion but net profits slipped to $582 million from $664 million in late 2024 in part because executives wrote down about $52 million of software development costs. For the year and adjusted for one-time items, AEP produced an operating profit of nearly $3.2 billion.

Shares of AEP (Ticker: AEP) rose more than 3% to about $126 on the heels of the results and conference call. Over the past six months, they have climbed more than 10%, which has grown the company’s market capitalization to more than $67 billion.