Entergy Boosts Four-Year Capex Plan by $14B on Back of Meta Deal
Entergy Corp. executives have added $14 billion to their four-year spending plan after signing an electric service agreement with Meta Platforms Inc. for another data center in Louisiana. That deal and other customer signings also led Chairman and CEO Drew Marsh and his team to lift Entergy’s retail sales growth outlook by half a point to 8.5% annually through 2029.
Announced in late March, Entergy’s partnership with Meta covers a data center plan for Northeast Louisiana’s Richland Parish that could grow over time to 5 gigawatts and is expected to save Entergy customers in the state about $2 billion over 20 years. The utility will build seven natural gas combined-cycle power plants (that will be put into service in the early 2030s), roughly 240 miles of transmission lines, three battery energy storage and other projects to help absorb the demand from the data center.
On a conference call discussing Entergy’s first-quarter results, CFO Kimberly Fontan said the company’s four-year capital spending plan now totals $57 billion compared to $43 billion a few months ago. That number, she added, is set to grow further as the Meta deal’s details and other investments get nailed down.
“For the transmission investments […], we’ve made a conservative assumption not to include them as we work through financing options,” Fontan told analysts. “We have also not yet included the renewables or River Bend nuclear upgrade investments discussed in our filings. These would be added to the plan as specific projects are firmed up.”
While data centers are a huge growth driver these days for Entergy and many of its peers, Marsh and Fontan also said their teams are seeing strong demand from what Fontan called “a variety of traditional Gulf South industries, including LNG, industrial gases, petrochemicals, agricultural chemicals, and primary metals.” Entergy, which runs five operating companies in four states, has signed service agreements with such companies for more than 1,000 megawatts of power. Marsh said many of those deals are for less than 20 MW but also noted that they’re not all certain to come through.
The interest from Meta and other industrial users means Entergy executives are now forecasting that industrial growth will average 16% through 2029, up a full percentage point from their previous forecast. Not included in that calculation: Another 7 to 12 GW of other data-center deals in the utility’s pipeline.
In the first three months of this year, Entergy booked a net profit of $385 million, up from $361 million in early 2025. Total revenues climbed to $3.19 billion from $2.85 billion in the prior-year period.
Shares of Entergy (Ticker: ETR) rose more than 1% after executives’ April 29 earnings report and conference call. They were changing hands around $116 on the afternoon of May 4 a d have now climbed more than 20% over the past six months, growing the company’s market capitalization to more than $53 billion.
About the Author
Geert De Lombaerde
Senior Editor
A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of business journalism experience and writes about markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications T&D World, Healthcare Innovation, IndustryWeek, FleetOwner and Oil & Gas Journal. With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati and later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector as well as many of its publicly traded companies.