Published on 28 May 2024 on Insider Monkey via Yahoo Finance

Is Southern Co (NYSE:SO) The Best Utilities Stock to Ride the AI Boom in 2024?

We recently analyzed top 8 utilities stocks that are popular among hedge funds because of their AI-related growth catalysts. Since Southern Co (NYSE:SO) was part of the list of these stocks, and being one of the biggest utilities providers in the US, it deserves a deeper look.

The AI revolution that started with the launch of ChatGPT has catapulted several sectors into the limelight that were hitherto believed to be unrelated to AI. Utilities is one of the most notable of these sectors. As more and more companies deploy AI in their systems and develop new applications, they need high-performance data centers to power their AI processing chips. And these data centers are power hogs. Why? Goldman Sachs in a recent report titled AI, data centers and the coming US power demand surge said that a single ChatGPT query takes about 6 to 10 times as much electricity to process as a typical Google search. Goldman Sachs also expects AI-led data center boom to cause a 160% increase in power demand in the U.S. Goldman analysts estimate that utility companies will invest $50 billion to support this new demand from the data center sector.