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Yesterday, at Entergy’s Investor Day at the New York Stock Exchange, the utility’s executives walked on stage alongside some unusual guests: representatives from both Meta and AWS.
Nat Sahlstrom, vice president of energy and sustainability at Meta, noted how remarkable his presence was: “We have two energy infrastructure folks from cloud companies sitting at the New York Stock Exchange, sharing anecdotes about our experience with an IOU. Fifteen years ago, that would have been unheard of.”
Back then, data centers were 10-megawatt facilities hosted in “converted chocolate chip cookie factories,” and energy was plentiful, he continued. Today, though, energy has “become the critical feedstock into cloud and AI infrastructure.”
What was also remarkable, in my view, was the fact that the utility and its hyperscaler customers presented themselves to investors as a united front. The latter were essentially acting as salespeople for Entergy’s stock. It’s the latest example of the increasingly tight collaboration between utilities and hyperscalers — a collaboration that, I should note before getting into the nuances of their business relationship, is potentially uncomfortable for the many people concerned about utility priorities as bills increase across much of the U.S.
