SO
Powering the AI hangover
Southern Company is getting a fresh thumbs-up from the analyst crowd, with a Buy rating and a $102 price target that implies about 9% upside. The pitch isn’t exactly rocket science: if the AI boom keeps sucking up electricity like your laptop battery on a 2% Zoom call, utilities with big grid footprints can turn that into very real revenue.
Data centers are the new VIP customer
The star of the show is data-center demand. Those massive server farms are helping push Southern’s wholesale electric sales higher, and the company said that slice of demand boosted sales by 30%. That’s not a rounding error — that’s the kind of number that gets investors to start treating utility stocks like a sneaky growth trade instead of just a sleepy dividend lane.
The numbers are doing the talking
The note also points to a strong first quarter:
- Revenue rose 8% year over year
- Adjusted EPS climbed 7.3% year over year
- The valuation still screens at or below five-year averages
That combo matters because it gives the stock a rare utility-stock twofer: growth is showing up, but the multiple still isn’t acting like the market has fully fallen in love yet.
Big picture
The analyst’s model assumes a 4.61% revenue CAGR and expanding margins through 2030, which is a fancy way of saying this could be more than a one-quarter story. If data center demand keeps climbing, Southern Company could end up looking less like a utility and more like the electrical backbone of the AI economy.