AEP's Record $100 Billion Grid Bet Runs Through an Old Uranium Plant in Ohio

On a flat stretch of federal land outside Piketon, Ohio, where the government once enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and power plants, crews are clearing ground for a data center campus designed to need 10 gigawatts of its own power, roughly the output of eight large nuclear reactors. The company that will build the wires to serve it, American Electric Power, spent its earnings call this week telling Wall Street exactly how much it's willing to spend to make sites like this one work, and how it plans to make sure the bill doesn't land on everyone else's porch.

AEP raised its five-year capital plan 30% on Wednesday, from $78 billion to $100 billion, the largest jump in the company's history. Split out, that's $37 billion for transmission, $36 billion for generation, and $22 billion for distribution, and it pushes AEP's projected rate base to $162 billion by 2031. The company also beat Wall Street's earnings estimate for the quarter, reporting adjusted earnings of $2.23 a share against a $2.04 consensus, and told investors it now expects operating earnings to grow faster than 10% a year through the end of the decade.

The driver behind all of it is a number that moved faster than almost anything else on the call: AEP's contracted large-load pipeline, the utility's term for customers big enough to need their own dedicated study and infrastructure build, grew from 69 gigawatts at the end of the second quarter to 84 gigawatts by the end of the third. That's a 15-gigawatt jump in three months, and the company says roughly 90% of it is data centers. For comparison, 84 gigawatts is more generating capacity than most states have, committed to serving one category of customer across AEP's footprint in Ohio, Indiana, Texas, Virginia, Kentucky, and West Virginia.

What makes a number that large survivable for a regulated utility is how the financing is structured, and AEP's own numbers show the work. Despite adding $22 billion to the five-year plan, the company said it only needs $5.2 billion more in new equity, because operating cash flow is expected to cover more than half of the increase. That's a company telling investors it isn't planning to lean on new shareholder dilution, or implicitly on ratepayers, to fund most of the buildout. Whether that holds depends on contracts signed well below the earnings-call level of detail.

The real question: who's actually paying for it

Ohio answered that question in writing last year. The state's Public Utilities Commission approved AEP Ohio's data center tariff in July 2025 after more than a year of contested hearings, and the structure is blunt: any data center larger than 25 megawatts has to pay for at least 85% of its contracted capacity for up to 12 years, including a four-year ramp-up period, whether it ever uses that much power or not. Before AEP will even study a project, the customer has to prove it can afford to build what it's asking for, and if the project falls through, it owes an exit fee. PUCO's own order said the point was to make sure infrastructure costs are borne by the customers causing them, not shifted onto everyone else's bill. The Data Center Coalition, the industry's own trade group, fought the terms and lost.

Ohio isn't a one-state exception. AEP has pushed versions of the same minimum-bill structure through regulators in Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia over the past two years, each one tailored to the local commission's own concerns but built around the same basic idea: a customer big enough to need its own substation has to commit to paying for most of that capacity for most of a decade, collateral and exit fees included, before the utility will spend ratepayer-adjacent dollars building it. That's the quiet infrastructure behind the headline capital number. A $100 billion plan is only as good as the four or five regulatory dockets, state by state, that actually determine whose money is paying for each gigawatt of it.

You can see that structure in the specific projects AEP's CEO, William Fehrman, pointed to on the call as proof the new capital plan is real money chasing real contracts, not a forecast. One was a roughly $5 billion, 765-kilovolt transmission build in southern Ohio, the same voltage class and the same region as the $4.2 billion transmission line SB Energy is funding directly, not AEP's ratepayers, to connect its 10-gigawatt Piketon campus. The other was a $4 billion, 702-megawatt fuel cell plant AEP is building near Cheyenne, Wyoming, financed on the strength of a 20-year power purchase agreement with a single customer: Google. In both cases, the company putting steel in the ground isn't betting on data centers showing up eventually. It has a signed contract, or a developer's own check, in hand first.

Back in Pike County, that math meets a place with history

The Piketon site is the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which enriched uranium from 1954 until it closed in 2001, and which the Department of Energy, SB Energy, and AEP Ohio announced in March as the future home of a 10-gigawatt data center campus and up to 10 gigawatts of new power generation, most of it natural gas. Power is targeted to start flowing by 2029, and Ohio's development director has said the project will bring more than 2,000 jobs to a county where the unemployment rate, at 4.8%, was already the fifth-highest of Ohio's 88 counties.

That's the part of the story worth leading with. It's also not the whole story, and I don't think it's honest to leave out the rest. Pike County's cancer rate, at roughly 544 deaths per 100,000 people, runs well above Ohio's statewide rate of about 471, a legacy tied in part to decades of radiation exposure from the old plant, including a 2019 incident that shut down a local middle school after radioactive contamination was detected in its air ducts. Vina Colley, a lifelong county resident who has spent years fighting for compensation and accountability over that history, isn't greeting the new campus as a clean break from the old plant's legacy. "They want to bring in the data center, they want to bring in the reactors, and they want to bring in the largest power gas facility," she told a local television station. "We don't want any of it."

Both things are true in Pike County at once: a county with genuine, longstanding economic need is getting a real jobs commitment, and a community that already paid a price once for federal energy infrastructure on this exact ground isn't required to forget that just because the new project runs on natural gas instead of centrifuges. Covering the positive case for this build-out honestly means not editing that history out of it.

What I'd actually tell anyone sizing up AEP's territory, or any utility's, off the back of a headline capital number is to skip the press release and go read the tariff order and the specific interconnection or power-purchase agreement behind the project you care about. A $100 billion plan funded mostly by customer contracts and developer-paid transmission lines is a fundamentally different risk than the same number funded by rate increases on everyone already on the grid. Ohio wrote the difference into a regulatory order a developer has to sign before AEP will even run a study. That's the document that tells you which kind of growth story you're actually looking at.