Mizuho raises NiSource stock price target on data center deals

The market is starting to price NI less as a regulated utility and more as a scarce “power platform” for hyperscale load, which changes the multiple framework. The second-order winner is not just NI’s earnings base, but its ability to de-risk future capital raises by demonstrating contracted demand before the wires and generation are fully built; that should tighten spread financing economics and support a slower equity dilution path over the next 12-24 months.

The hidden beneficiary set extends to the industrial and equipment chain tied to interconnects, substations, turbines, switchgear, and gas backup capacity. If these load ramps are real, the bottleneck shifts from demand to execution, which favors suppliers with long lead-time order books and pricing power, while punishing utilities or power developers that cannot secure generation and transmission assets fast enough.

The key risk is that the market is extrapolating a 2027-2029 earnings bridge from agreements that still depend on permitting, interconnection, and capex sequencing. Any slippage in load timing or a higher-than-expected equity funding component would compress the implied upside quickly, especially because the stock has already rerated on the narrative and now trades more on milestone delivery than on near-term earnings.

Consensus may be underestimating how much optionality these deals create for a multi-year data-center backlog, but may also be overestimating the near-term monetization rate. The cleanest way to express the view is that NI has a longer-duration growth story than a typical utility, yet the near-term catalyst path remains binary: either the company keeps converting letters of intent into funded projects, or the stock de-rates back toward a standard utility multiple once the hype premium fades.