Entergy Corporation

What does Entergy own?

Entergy owns five regulated electric utilities in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, plus System Energy Resources, which holds the regulated nuclear fleet. Together they serve about 3 million customers and operate roughly 24,000 megawatts of generation capacity. All customer-facing service runs under the Entergy brand.

Is Entergy publicly traded?

Yes. Entergy Corporation trades on the New York Stock Exchange and NYSE Texas under the ticker ETR and is a member of the S&P 500. Institutional investors hold most shares, and no controlling owner exists.

Who founded Entergy?

Harvey C. Couch founded the Arkansas Power Company on November 13, 1913, after striking a deal to burn sawmill sawdust for power generation. His utilities were folded into Middle South Utilities in 1949, which renamed itself Entergy in 1989.

Where is Entergy headquartered?

Entergy Corporation is headquartered in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. Its principal offices are in the Entergy Tower on Loyola Avenue in downtown New Orleans.

How many brands does Entergy own?

One. Entergy is the single customer-facing brand across all five state operating companies. The legal names Entergy Arkansas, Entergy Louisiana, and the others appear in regulatory documents but not in consumer marketing.

Who owns Entergy?

Public shareholders own Entergy Corporation. Its shares are held broadly by institutional and retail investors, with no controlling family or government stake. Drew Marsh serves as chair of the board and chief executive officer.

Is Entergy building for data centers?

Yes. Since 2024 Entergy has signed multi-gigawatt electric service agreements with hyperscale customers, anchored by Meta's Hyperion data center campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana. The company describes its industrial sales pipeline as the largest growth driver in its history and is adding gas, transmission, and renewable capacity to serve it.

The company began on November 13, 1913, when Arkansas entrepreneur Harvey Couch shook hands with H.H. Foster, president of Arkansas Land and Lumber, on a deal to burn sawmill waste as boiler fuel. Couch's Arkansas Power Company, soon renamed Arkansas Power and Light, strung 22 miles of transmission line between Malvern and Arkadelphia. It was the only interconnected electric service in Arkansas at the time.

Through the 1920s Couch assembled a regional system, merging four Mississippi utilities into Mississippi Power and Light in 1923 and helping form Louisiana Power and Light in 1925. That same year his companies combined with the Electric Power and Light Corporation, a holding unit of the Electric Bond and Share Company. When the Public Utility Holding Company Act broke up the national holding systems, the four operating companies were reorganized under a new parent, Middle South Utilities, in 1949.

Middle South Utilities became an early nuclear adopter, building Arkansas Nuclear One at Russellville in the late 1960s and Grand Gulf in Mississippi the following decade. Grand Gulf's cost overruns triggered years of regulatory conflict and a landmark 1988 Supreme Court ruling that let Mississippi regulators assign most of the plant's cost to customers. In 1989 the holding company renamed itself Entergy, and on January 1, 1994, it merged with Gulf States Utilities of Beaumont, Texas, adding the Texas and southwest Louisiana footprint.

The 2000s brought a second identity. Entergy assembled the nation's second-largest merchant nuclear fleet by buying plants including Indian Point, Vermont Yankee, Pilgrim, Palisades, and FitzPatrick, then exited the merchant nuclear business as cheap natural gas crushed margins, selling or closing the entire merchant fleet by 2022. Its regulated nuclear units remained.

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Ida in 2021 bookended the company's storm history. Ida knocked out all eight transmission lines into New Orleans and drove Entergy to pursue a multi-billion-dollar grid resilience program. Leo Denault led the company as chairman and CEO for a decade before Drew Marsh, formerly executive vice president and CFO, became chief executive officer in November 2024 and board chair in 2025.

Entergy has committed to achieving net-zero carbon dioxide emissions from its operations by 2050, with an interim target of cutting its carbon emission rate roughly in half by 2030 from a 2000 baseline. Its regulated nuclear fleet already supplies a large block of carbon-free power to the four-state system, and the company has been adding utility-scale solar across Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

The tension in the strategy is new gas build. Serving the data center pipeline requires dispatchable generation, and Entergy's 2025 performance report acknowledges that near-term additions will be cleaner but not carbon-free. The company frames its climate path as customer-driven, pairing nuclear life extensions and renewables with the gas capacity its industrial customers require.

Entergy directs more than $100 million per year in philanthropy, volunteerism, and community programs, a figure it cites regularly in its corporate reporting.

Entergy's regulatory history carries several documented controversies. In 2018 the New Orleans City Council approved a $5 million fine against Entergy New Orleans after an investigation found that paid actors had attended public hearings to support a proposed gas plant. The company's then-chief executive for the New Orleans utility departed, and the plant was ultimately approved in a modified form.

Hurricane Ida in August 2021 caused a catastrophic outage, with all eight transmission lines into New Orleans failing and parts of Louisiana dark for weeks. Regulators and customers criticized storm preparedness, and Entergy subsequently filed multi-billion-dollar resilience plans in Louisiana, portions of which gained approval and portions of which remain contested over cost allocation between shareholders and ratepayers.

The company's nuclear history includes the Grand Gulf cost battle of the 1980s, resolved by the Supreme Court's 1988 Mississippi Power and Light v. Mississippi decision, and tritium leaks at the now-retired Indian Point plant in New York, which contributed to New York State's push to close the facility in 2021.