Executives at Dominion Energy Inc. and Duke Energy Corp. have added a combined $17 billion to their five-year capital investment plans, with both groups saying that the data center boom shows no signs of slowing.

At Dominion, which services the heart of the U.S. data center industry in Northern Virginia, Chairman, President and CEO Bob Blue and his team have bumped up their capex plan covering 2025 to 2029 by nearly $7 billion to $50.1 billion. The company’s Virginia utility will get more than $41 billion of that sum to feed rate base growth executives think will average 9.4% annually through the end of the 2020s.

The numbers around data centers and Dominion are dumbfounding: From the beginning of July through the end of December, companies committed to nearly 19 gigawatts of power, growing Dominion’s contracted capacity by 88% to more than 40 GW. Blue noted, in addition to increased demand in the core of Northern Virginia, data center players are increasingly moving down the Interstate 95 corridor from there and added that the Richmond area is growing “pretty substantially” as well.

“We’ve analyzed the data several ways, and certainly we believe some of this growth is attributable to the new batch system, which naturally incents customers to get into the process early,” Blue told analysts on a Feb. 12 conference call. “But what’s undeniable is that data center growth in Virginia is not slowing down. In fact, it’s accelerating and we’re taking every step to meet this opportunity.”

It’s a similar story at Charlotte-based Duke, where Chair and CEO Lynn Good and her team on Feb. 13 unveiled an $83 billion five-year spending plan that’s $10 billion larger than their forecast for 2024 through 2028 had been. Advanced manufacturing projects in the pipeline for the Carolinas, Florida and other areas Duke services account for some of that growth, executives said, but data centers are playing a growing role: Good said data centers now account for half of the company’s pipeline for 2029.

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