Black Hills is a regulated electric and gas utility headquartered in Rapid City, South Dakota. Black Hills serves roughly 227,000 electric customers across Colorado, Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming, and about 1.14 million natural gas customers across Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming. Customers are primarily residential and commercial. The electric business covers standard power needs, while the gas business is used primarily for space heating, making both businesses weather-sensitive and seasonal. Black Hills earns regulated returns on its capital base, with state commissions and FERC authorizing rates that let it recover costs and earn an allowed return on equity currently ranging from roughly 9.3% to 9.9% across its jurisdictions. The primary earnings driver is rate base growth — Black Hills invests capital in safety, reliability, and system expansion, then recovers those investments through periodic rate reviews and interim rider mechanisms. Black Hills also owns a coal mine in Wyoming that supplies fuel directly to its adjacent coal-fired plants. A growing earnings contributor is data center load: Black Hills has served Microsoft's hyperscale data centers in Cheyenne, Wyoming for over a decade and is adding Meta's AI data center. Under a distinctive tariff structure, Black Hills procures market energy for these large customers and charges a fee, earning utility-like returns without significant generation investment. Black Hills has a $4.7B five-year capital plan and a pipeline of over 3 GW of additional data center demand under negotiation. In August 2025, Black Hills announced an all-stock merger with NorthWestern Energy, expected to close in the second half of 2026, which would create a combined utility serving roughly 700,000 electric and 1.5 million gas customers across eight states.