Alliant Energy Wants 1 GW of Data-Center Contracts in Six Months — but the Bottleneck Is a Rate Docket, Not a Turbine

On October 29, 2026, Alliant Energy reported third-quarter GAAP earnings of $1.52 per share against $1.09 a year earlier, narrowed 2026 ongoing EPS guidance to $3.41–$3.46 from $3.36–$3.46, and guided 2027 to $3.63–$3.73. The number that mattered came from the call the next morning, when CFO Robert Durian said the company expects to produce approximately one additional gigawatt of contracted large load within the next six months. Add the 3.4 GW already contracted with Alphabet, Meta and QTS and the target takes Alliant to 4.4 GW of contracted data-center demand — the biggest book at the smallest utility carrying it. On the CFO's own capital-per-gigawatt math, the announcement commits roughly $2.5 billion of capital before a single rate docket opens.

The reframe matters because the plan, not the contract, is the commitment. Alliant's capital expenditure runs $2,860 million in 2026, $4,305 million in 2027 and $4,735 million in 2028 — a step-up of more than 50% from the $2,483 million it spent in all of 2025. Add the 2026 year to the $15.9 billion four-year plan and the company is committing $18.8 billion, roughly 4.3 times its FY2025 revenue of $4.36 billion. Spends more than four years of revenue on a five-year program, funded with a dividend that grew to $2.14 per share for 2026 and is now targeted at $2.25 for 2027.

The most useful slide Alliant showed in March 2026 was a four-step chain: customer electric service agreement signed, individual customer rate filed, individual customer rate approved, construction started. Nothing in that chain is about megawatts; it is about a docket calendar. Alliant already has three matters in front of the Wisconsin Public Service Commission — the Cedar Rapids individual customer rate for Alphabet (docket TF-2025-0007) and the QTS 1 Cedar Rapids rate (TF-2025-0047), both approved, and the Beaver Dam individual contract rate for Meta (docket 6680-TE-115), approved in modified form on May 7, 2026. In that same order the commission required Alliant to file a utility-wide tariff for every data center above 100 MW and to serve all future hyperscale sites under standardized terms. A gigawatt now turns into a rate case before it becomes a revenue line.

Here is the number that matters more than the gigawatt. Management funds roughly 40% of incremental capital expenditure with common equity — the low end of its stated 40%–50% range — and the refreshed four-year plan carries $2.7 billion of common equity, of which $1.1 billion is already secured through forward agreements that cover expected needs through the first half of 2028. The rest, plus whatever the new gigawatt requires, has to be sold into the market. Management attributes roughly 375 basis points of the growth gap to equity issuance and about 50 basis points to refinancing.

Set the megawatt counts side by side and Alliant looks like the winner: 3.4 GW contracted on FY2025 revenue of $4.36 billion, more contracted load per dollar of sales than any peer. Read the contract structures and the picture changes. Evergy's 2026 electric service agreements cover about 2,600 MW and already sit in $16.0 billion of remaining performance obligations across three operating companies, on weighted-average remaining terms of 14 to 17 years. Ameren's Missouri operation signed binding agreements totaling 2.2 GW in February 2026, with customers committing to pay for 80% of their requested electricity for at least 12 years. And the Wisconsin utility of WEC Energy Group won a very large customer tariff in April 2026 with a 15-year minimum initial term and full responsibility for generation costs. On that reading, Alliant Energy has the most megawatts and the least contract certainty.

The disclosure gap is the tell. Evergy publishes contracted obligations and weighted-average remaining terms; Alliant publishes megawatts and a growth rate. Alliant Energy leaves its 3.4 GW book unpriced in public disclosure, which is part of why the equity market rather than the commission is being asked to fund it. The offsetting point is real: Alliant has said all growth in its plan is contractually secured by long-term electric service agreements with high-quality customers, and its 2027 guidance already assumes new data-center revenue. Whether the standardized Wisconsin tariff preserves the economics of those bespoke contracts is exactly what the commission will decide in the first half of 2027.

The upstream shows where the money actually goes. GE Vernova booked 16.6 GW of gas turbine orders in the third quarter of 2026 alone and 36.7 GW over nine months, and its Power segment equipment backlog more than doubled to $54.4 billion from $24.7 billion at the end of 2025; total remaining performance obligations reached $196.7 billion. Alliant's 1.2 GW of additional combustion turbines is roughly 7% of a single quarter's industry orders — immaterial for the utility, decisive for the supplier. The physical queue is tighter still: step-up transformer lead times passed 160 weeks by the first quarter of 2026, against an average of 143 weeks in 2024. The manufacturer is paid at order and delivery while the utility waits for a docket.

A gigawatt is only a contract if the counterparty builds. Alphabet's capital expenditure reached $51.4 billion in the third quarter of 2026 and $132.0 billion over the first nine months, with negative free cash flow of $9.1 billion in the quarter — a funding capacity that makes Alliant's 1 GW a rounding error on the customer's side. Meta has committed more than $1 billion to the Beaver Dam campus. QTS, the data-center platform owned by Blackstone, is building a Cedar Rapids campus expected to draw about 1.05 GW of electricity. The equipment layer confirms the money is real: Vertiv reported third-quarter net sales of $4.31 billion, up 61% year over year, with organic orders up more than 100%. Vertiv's customers prepaid $4.1 billion for equipment that has not shipped, 3.6 times the level a year earlier.

Three things can be separated cleanly. Facts: Alliant has 3.4 GW contracted, a $15.9 billion four-year capital plan, and a $5.1 billion federal loan package that lowers its funding cost. Inference: the six-month gigawatt is a financing decision as much as a commercial one, because the capital has to be committed before the load can be approved for recovery. Speculation: where the additional gigawatt lands, and how generous the standardized tariff turns out to be relative to the bespoke contracts it replaces, are both unresolved until the commission rules in the first half of 2027. The defensible position is narrow — the funding is largely solved and the payoff timing is not.