The Demand Case Vindicated#

Commercial Load Growth Breaks Free#

Southern Company's third-quarter earnings report has delivered the empirical validation that investors have been awaiting for nearly two years as the company executes on its transformational infrastructure thesis. The third quarter of 2025 produced earnings per share of $1.55 on a reported basis, representing an increase of 10.7 per cent from the third quarter of 2024, while operating revenues expanded by 7.5 per cent to $7.8 billion, demonstrating that the company's growth narrative is not merely a management aspiration but an increasingly tangible operational reality. These headline results obscure a more granular story embedded in retail load composition, where commercial customers have driven the earnings improvement through weather-adjusted electricity consumption growth of 3.5 per cent, a rate that fundamentally reshapes investor expectations about the timing and magnitude of data centre load materialisation in the Southeast.