Regulators weigh billion-dollar utility takeovers as bills rise for consumers

Source: Scripps News/AP

Posted 7:40 AM, Sep 27, 2025


Private investment firms that are helping finance America’s artificial intelligence race and the huge buildout of energy-hungry data centers are getting interested in the local utilities that deliver electricity to regular customers — and the servers that power AI.

Billions of dollars from such firms are now flowing toward electric utilities in places including New Mexico, Texas, Wisconsin and Minnesota that deliver power to more than 150 million customers across millions of miles of power lines. “The reason is very simple: because there’s a lot of money to be made,” said Greg Brown, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor of finance who researches private equity and hedge funds.

Private investment firms that have done well investing in infrastructure over the last 15 years now have strong incentives to add data centers, power plants and the services that support them at a time of rapid expansion and spiking demand ignited by the late 2022 debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Brown said.

BlackRock's CEO Larry Fink said as much in a July interview on CNBC, saying infrastructure is “at the beginning of a golden age.” “We believe that there’s a need for trillions of dollars investing in infrastructure related to our power grids, AI, the whole digitization of the economy" and energy, Fink said.

Read more: https://www.scrippsnews.com/business/regulators-weigh-billion-dollar-utility-takeovers-as-bills-rise-for-consumers