US utility Southern Company has seen its contracted large-load pipeline surge by 6GW to 17GW since its last earnings report.

The Birmingham, Alabama-headquartered utility, which supplies electricity and gas to six states in the South of the US through several subsidiaries, reported the news in its Q2 earnings report.

“The extraordinary economic development momentum and demand for power across our southeast region that we’ve seen for the past several years continues, particularly from data centers and other large load customers,” said Chris Womack, chairman, president, and CEO of Southern Company.

The new contracted load includes Georgia Power’s 3.2GW, 25-year contract with OpenAI for a data center site near Savannah, Georgia.

Beyond the 17GW already contracted, Womack said there are an additional 8GW of projects in late stages, including 3GW projected to be finalized in the near term.

Womack also said that the utility’s prospective pipeline of large industrial and data center projects is now well above 75GW.

The utility also reported that data center power usage across its footprint was 55 percent higher compared to Q2 of last year, “primarily due to accelerating load ramps from our large load customers,” said Womack.

Across its system, Southern said that operational data center load now exceeds 1.2GW, an increase of more than 500MW compared to last year.

Southern CEO Womack also referenced the “noise” surrounding moratoriums on new data center builds across the country.

“There’s noise all across the country about data centers, I think there’s no moratorium across the state. There may be some moratoriums in various counties, I think you continue to see progress, activities, projects move forward in our territory. Once again, I’ll say we’ve got to do a better job. Hyperscalers need to do a better job of explaining the benefits and value and dispelling some of the misinformation that’s out there on social media,” he said.

Since the call, New York has become the first state in the US to enact a moratorium on new data center construction.

Southern Company provides regulated electric and gas utility service to more than nine million customers across six states. It covers major parts of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

In February, the utility secured a $26.5 billion loan from the US Department of Energy for its subsidiary’s projects in Georgia and Alabama. The loan will be delivered by the DOE’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing (EDF) and will support Georgia Power and Alabama Power in building out and upgrading more than 16GW of firm power for both states’ grids.