Californian utility company Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) has seen its data center pipeline fall by 400MW compared to June, reporting 9.6GW of projects seeking a connection.

In its Q3 earnings report, PG&E CFO Carolyn Burke said that the fall was a reflection of the utility’s “no big bets plan.”

While the utility saw a decline in early-stage data center projects in its pipeline, it reported that 18 projects totaling 1.6GW have entered the final engineering stage, up from 1.5GW reported in its Q2 earnings report. The company has said it expects 95 percent of the projects that reach this stage to achieve operational status by 2030, with several slated for service as soon as 2026.

Commenting on the results, PG&E CEO Patricia Poppe said: "Our data center pipeline remains robust at over 9.5GW. We've seen modest net attrition in our application and preliminary engineering phase since June. However, our projects in the final engineering stage continue to grow and advance. Most of the applications in our pipeline are for 100MW or less.”

Poppe went on to contend that the utility is confident that data centers designed to support AI inference models will “have strong and compelling reasons to want to locate in PG&E’s service area, which includes Silicon Valley.”

The utility went on to say it is also confident that through connecting data center customers, it will be able to reduce electric bills for other ratepayers by one to two percent.

Its capital investment plan remained unchanged from its Q2 results, with the utility still intending to invest up to $73 billion across its service area. However, CFO Carolyn Burke said it was unlikely that PG&E would expand its capital plan to attract additional large-load customers due to the company’s low stock valuation.

The utility has made several notable announcements within the data center space in 2025 so far. Late last year, the utility announced that it would develop three data centers in San Jose, totaling 200MW. The project is being developed in partnership with real estate firm Westbank.

Earlier this year, the company signed a first-of-its-kind Implementation Agreement with the City of San Jose to streamline and guarantee power delivery for data centers and other large load customers.

The utility has also recently partnered with smart transmission firm Smart Wires on a new project aiming to enhance grid reliability and support the growth of data center energy consumption in San Jose.