Duke Energy: Data Center Pipeline at 15.4GW, Florida, Indiana Lead

Duke Energy told investors on its Q2 2026 earnings call Tuesday that signed data center electric service agreements now total 7.8 gigawatts, with another 15.4 gigawatts of high-confidence pipeline the utility expects to convert to firm contracts by the first half of 2027. A trade item circulating this week cited a 2.7 gigawatt pipeline jump since Q4 2025, but that figure describes Duke’s Q1 2026 print from May, not the disclosure Duke just made. The number that matters for site selection is the one Duke gave this week: executives said Florida and Indiana carry the majority of the late-stage pipeline.

Why it matters

Power availability, not land cost, is the binding constraint on where the next wave of hyperscale data centers gets built, and Duke Energy is one of the few utilities disclosing pipeline detail by state. Duke serves the Carolinas, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Florida, six states spanning some of the country’s tightest and loosest interconnection queues. When a utility this size says two of its six states are absorbing most of the near-term load, that is a direct read on where land near substations and transmission capacity gets scarce first, ahead of any public site announcement.

The numbers

Signed ESAs reached 7.8GW, up only 0.2GW from the 7.6GW Duke reported at its Q1 2026 call, a sharp deceleration from the 2.7GW added the quarter before. Duke has 5.2GW of data center load already under construction. The forward pipeline sits at 15.4GW, with Duke’s own executives naming Florida and Indiana as the states holding the majority of that late-stage load, the Carolinas load forecast shifted to a “high load case,” and Ohio and Kentucky flagged as additional opportunity not yet quantified. Duke’s current capital plan runs $103 billion through 2030, and the company said data center contracts could add $5 billion to $10 billion more once agreements are signed and the generation and transmission behind them are modeled.

What’s next

Customers under the newest contracts are expected to start drawing power as early as the second half of 2027, ramping to full contracted load into the early 2030s. For developers scouting sites, the signal is to concentrate diligence on Duke’s Florida and Indiana territory, where the utility itself says the late-stage pipeline is thickest, and to treat the Carolinas’ new high-load planning case as an early marker for where the next capacity crunch shows up in the national queue.