With a combined revenue of $21 trillion and $2.1 trillion in profits, the 2026 Fortune 500 is the definitive list of America's largest companies.

Fortune 500

Almost $20 trillion in revenue—and a record-breaking $1.87 trillion in profits. Introducing the 2025 Fortune 500, the definitive list of the biggest companies in America.

Industries included in the sector are mining, oil and gas exploration and services, pipelines, refining, and utilities.

Fortune Sector Leaders: Energy

The Fortune 500, in its 70th year in 2024, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

The Fortune 500, in its 69th year in 2023, ranks the biggest U.S. companies by revenue.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 68th running of the list.

This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 67th running of the list.

F500-2021-379-Williams

The oil and gas company was founded in 1908 and grew quickly to manage nationwide pipelines, which it still maintains today.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 66th running of the list.

F500-2020-387-Williams

The Tulsa-based energy company focuses on natural gas and petroleum exploration and production, with assets concentrated along the Gulf of Mexico and the Eastern Seaboard.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 64th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 63rd running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 62nd running of the list.

Business insiders have spoken: Asked which companies they most admire, more than 4,100 executives, directors, and analysts chose these top 50 All-Stars.

World's Most Admired Companies

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. Wal-Mart claims the top spot again. See who made the list.

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Williams is a leading energy infrastructure company. Founded in 1908, Williams specializes in the gathering, processing, storage, and transportation of natural gas, operating over 30,000 miles of pipelines across the United States, including the flagship Transco pipeline network, the nation's largest-volume natural gas pipeline, stretching from Texas to New York. Handling approximately 30% of the natural gas consumed daily in the U.S., Williams plays a crucial role in delivering reliable and low-cost energy to homes and businesses.

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Williams (WMB): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Williams

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Good day everyone, welcome to the Williams First Quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, for opening remarks and introductions, I would now like to turn the call over to Danilo Juvane, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Antoine, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us and for your interest in The Williams Companies. Yesterday afternoon, we released our earnings press release and the presentation that our President and CEO, Chad Zamarin, and our Chief Financial Officer, John Porter, who will speak to you this morning.

Also joining us on the call today are Larry Larsen, our Chief Operating Officer, and Rob Wingo, our Executive Vice President of Corporate Strategic Development. In our presentation materials, you'll find a disclaimer related to forward-looking statements. This disclaimer is important and integral to our remarks. You should review it.

Also included in the presentation materials are non-GAAP measures that we reconcile with generally accepted accounting principles. These reconciliation schedules appear at the back of today's presentation materials. With that, I'll turn it over to Chad.

Thanks, Danilo, and thank you all for joining us today. We're off to a great start in 2026. Our teams delivered another quarter of growth. We advanced our critical pipe and power projects in execution, we commercialized three new major projects and upsized a fourth. First quarter earnings per share grew by 22% and adjusted EBITDA grew 13% to a record $2.25 billion.

Our momentum continues to build, demonstrating the scalability of our strategy, the ongoing strength of our assets, and the growing contribution from our expansion projects. Our teams continue to execute high return expansions at a steady pace while adding new projects to our robust backlog. During the quarter, we made consistent progress across our projects in execution.

Most notably, we placed the Naughton Coal Conversion project into service, a critical milestone that again demonstrates how we help customers transition to cleaner burning natural gas while maintaining affordability and grid reliability. We also kicked off construction on NESE, the Northeast Supply Enhancement Project, and SESE, the Southeast Supply Enhancement Project.

Moving these large-scale pipeline projects into the construction phase is a testament to our team's ability to navigate complex permitting to deliver the infrastructure our country so desperately needs. I'm also excited to report that we have now placed on foundation all of the turbines at our Socrates Power Solution Facilities. In addition, we've completed construction on the first phase of the Aristotle pipeline, which will serve as a natural gas energy artery for several of our power innovation projects in Ohio, including Socrates. We aren't slowing down.

We continue to sign new deals at attractive multiples that will drive growth through the end of the decade and beyond and help us achieve the +10% earnings CAGR we set out at Analyst Day. Based on the strong start to the year and our visibility into the remainder of the year, we are currently pointing toward the upper half of our full-year EBITDA guidance, as John will detail shortly.

Looking forward, we continue to find new ways to solve the energy challenges of today, including the massive power needs of next generation data centers. Today, we're announcing three new major projects that further advance our strategy. The first project, NEO, is our fifth commercialized behind-the-meter power innovation project with a high-quality hyperscaler counterpart.

NEO is the largest power project Williams has announced to date, consisting of 682 megawatts of installed capacity, a 12.5-year contract, and an in-service date in the second half of 2028. Like our other power innovation projects, we expect to execute NEO at an attractive 5x build multiple, and the project is expected to represent an investment of approximately $2.3 billion.

Our second new project is Atlas, which consists of a gas infrastructure agreement to provide up to 164 million cubic feet per day of pipeline capacity to serve a large investment-grade customer data center in the Northeast. This project has a 13-year term, and we expect it to be in service by the end of this year.

While relatively modest in CapEx, Atlas demonstrates our ability to deliver an efficient natural gas solution for providing backup energy supply to existing data centers in lieu of diesel generation.

Our third new project is Silver Spur, which is a significant expansion of our Northwest Pipeline system and includes the installation of compression and the construction of a 90-mile transmission pipeline into the Idaho market that will add 275 million cubic feet per day of natural gas pipeline capacity.

Silver Spur represents the first phase of our previously discussed Rockies Columbia Connector Project and is one of the first major expansions of pipeline infrastructure in the Pacific Northwest in over two decades. We are targeting an in-service date of early 2030 for Silver Spur.

Beyond the three new major projects, we are also announcing an upsizing of the Transco Power Express project in response to the continually growing need for natural gas to power data centers and market growth in Virginia. With the addition of a new customer and the upsizing of an existing commitment, Power Express has been increased to 750 million cubic feet per day of new Transco capacity that is scheduled to come online in 2030.

As we continue to see very strong demand for natural gas translating into new projects and a growing backlog, we are also seeing the supply response across our footprint.

In the first quarter alone, we sanctioned roughly 700 million cubic feet per day of new expansion projects across our gathering and processing portfolio. Collectively, the first quarter results further highlight our position at the intersection of incredible potential and the energy required to achieve it. By achieving another quarter of record results while commercializing and progressing key growth projects, the strategic direction is clear.

Natural gas demand is rising, our contracted project backlog is growing, and we are staying laser-focused on execution and value creation. That combination will continue to drive the higher earnings and cash flow that will deliver strong long-term return for our shareholders. With that, I'll now turn it over to John for a deeper dive into the financials.

Thanks, Chad. As Chad shared, we've had a strong start to 2026 with record first quarter 2026 EBITDA up 13% over 2025. Bridging from last year's $1.99 billion to this year's $2.25 billion, our overall financial performance continues to be led by our transmission and Gulf businesses, which improved nearly $150 million or about 17%.

It was a great first quarter with growth across every business in this segment. Transco grew about 10% year-over-year, driven by higher tariff rates following last year's rate case settlement, as well as the effects of numerous expansion projects. Our deepwater Gulf businesses grew more than 60%, reflecting the combined effects of our recent Gulf expansion projects. We also saw a 35% increase from our natural gas storage businesses.

Our Northeast G&P business grew $10 million or up 2%. A strong growth in the rich gas areas was offset by volume declines in certain dry gas areas. The West grew $56 million or about 16%, led by our Haynesville investments, including a full quarter of service from our Louisiana Energy Gateway Pipeline. Our Sequent marketing business had another strong start to the year with $227 million of adjusted EBITDA.

I'll note that about $15 million of the overall $72 million increase for Sequent was related to the Cogentrix investment acquired in March of 2025. As a reminder, we expected to vest our Cogentrix investment later this year. Finally, our other segment, which includes our upstream businesses, was down about $20 million, primarily due to our divestiture of the upstream Haynesville assets, which closed in January of 2026.

Of course, we've excluded the roughly $180 million book gain on these assets from all our recurring financial metrics. It's a great way to start the year with 13% adjusted EBITDA growth, which also fueled a 22% increase in our adjusted earnings per share. Before I hand it back over to Chad, I'll offer a few thoughts on our full year 2026 guidance.

As we've mentioned, based on the strong start we've had in the first quarter, if everything else goes according to plan, we are now guiding to the upper half of our original adjusted EBITDA guidance.

As a reminder, 2026 is another year where we expect seasonally lower EBITDA results in 2Q before resuming sequential growth through the second half of the year, including the partial start of the Socrates facility beginning in the third quarter. Shifting now to CapEx leverage and our financing plans, we're excited to add another significant power innovation project in Neo.

As a result, we're increasing our growth CapEx midpoint for 2026 to $7.3 billion. With the addition of another power innovation project, leverage moves modestly above our target range of 3.5-4x-4.1x. Importantly, as we previously discussed, the balance sheet leverage tightness is primarily an issue for 2026 and 2027 before the historic earnings growth we expect in 2028 and beyond.

In the meantime, we're preserving multiple options to manage leverage while continuing to advance these projects and other opportunities on the horizon. As I previously discussed, those financing options include bringing in partners, and we continue to see robust interest from a broad group of potential counterparties.

We're not locked into any single path, and we have great flexibility based on timing, market conditions, and cost of capital. I'd expect us to firm up our financing plans over the next couple of months. Overall, we're very encouraged by the strength of our first quarter results, the ongoing strong execution across our project portfolio, and the continued commercialization of new business. We feel well-positioned with the flexibility to fund growth. With that, I'll turn it back to Chad.

Thanks, John. I recently had the opportunity to join an incredible group of leaders, including Secretary of Interior Burgum, Secretary of Energy Wright, EPA Administrator Zeldin, and FERC Chairman Swett, as we celebrated the groundbreaking of our NESE project, the first new gas pipeline into New York City in over a decade, a project many thought impossible.

Looking out at the crowd, which included Williams employees and union workers who will support their families and communities through their work on this project, I was reminded of the role we play in a stronger, more resilient America, not just through pipelines and power, but through livelihoods, through the meaning and purpose of the men and women who do the essential work of delivering the energy infrastructure of America. These are the real heroes of our energy and our environment.

They work every day to bring affordable energy to homes and businesses, and they work every day to preserve and advance the quality of life that we are blessed to have, and they do it while advancing sustainability and a better world for future generations. As we look forward throughout 2026 and beyond, we will continue to stay focused on smart and sustainable growth and efficient and reliable operations.

We will also continue to advocate for permitting and judicial reform to help America further accelerate the infrastructure needed to increase affordability, bolster reliability, and enable economic prosperity and national energy security. Of course, none of the work and progress is possible without the investors who support Williams. Thank you for your support of our company and our team. I want to close by thanking our employees for their unwavering commitment to safely and reliably serving our customers and our nation.

The Williams leadership team is incredibly proud to work with such a talented group during this exciting era of growth for our company. With that, we'll now open up the line for questions.

Thank you. At this time, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during this session, you need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Our first question comes from Jeremy Tonet from J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Thanks for all the color today and details on the Project Neo there. I was wondering if I could dive into, I guess, the power market a little bit more. If you could provide any more incremental color, I guess, on the relative level of appetite that you're seeing now versus where you were before and, I guess, how you think, you know, deal formation could proceed going forward here, you know, after this large deal.

Yeah. Thanks, Jeremy. By the way, great job on your note yesterday. I love the May the fourth be with you theme.

You know, I would just say that we've continued to see very strong interest in our projects. You know, we've, I think you've seen, you know, the challenges that we're gonna have as a country. You know, we've been living the difficulty of building infrastructure on the pipeline side for some time, but we're also seeing that clearly on the data center side.

I think our ability to bring tailored energy solutions to, you know, data center projects is continually being recognized as a smart solution to balance grid reliability, affordability for consumers, and the need for speed for these facilities. You know, you've seen our backlog. We talked about it at Analyst Day. NEO represents the single largest project that we've announced to date.

You will likely, you know, as you do the math, also see that the cost and efficiency of our project continues to also improve. We continue to see robust demand. The backlog I'd say it remains as robust, if not more so than we discussed at Analyst Day. Yeah, I'd say we continue to expect the cadence of projects to layer in as we've discussed kind of over the next several years.

No change. If nothing else, I'd say stronger recognition that a combination of solutions, including behind the meter, hybrid solutions, and grid complementary solutions are gonna be required for not just the near term, but for a long time to make sure that we can meet the needs of data centers without compromising the grid or consumer affordability.

Got it. Thank you for that. I was just curious, you know, the industry has long talked about the need for permitting reform and the importance of gaining that to develop the needed infrastructure in the country. As you talk to your local state senators, what do they say about the prospects for this in D.C. right now?

Yeah. Look, I mean, we remain hopeful. I've spoken about last year, the House passed a bill that had many of the provisions that we'd like to see passed into law. The Senate is working on advancing permitting reform this year. You know, we're lucky to have a very strong, you know, delegation from here in Oklahoma, including Alan, who, you know, was appointed recently to fill Markwayne Mullin's seat.

You know, we will continue to advocate for meaningful permitting reform. The two primary issues that we're gonna keep focused on, there are a lot of great, I think, improvements that we can see, and the House bill had many of those.

The two primary ones are, for us, addressing the 401 permitting process and making sure that when you get a FERC certificate, when you've gone through the very robust and rigorous environmental permitting process, you have your federal permit that a single state can't stop a project through the 401 process. We haven't asked that not be required, but that be a part of the federal permitting process.

I think that's pretty reasonable. Also, we as a country, not just for pipelines, we need judicial reform. We are advocating for any bill to have strong judicial reform so that, you know, we, I've said this before. We spent 13 years in litigation on Atlantic Sunrise. We won every lawsuit along the way.

All that did was delay the project and increase the cost to the consumer. Unfortunately, that's not unique to Atlantic Sunrise. That's every infrastructure project in our country. It's just too easy to tie projects up in litigation. You know, those are the two big, big-ticket issues with a lot of other, I think, improvements that can be made.

We are hopeful that the Senate will act this year. I know there's a lot of good effort going on across, you know, the Senate, including just recently, Senator McCormick from Pennsylvania released a bill. We love the effort and the leadership on that front. We think there's more that we should build upon, but we're seeing a lot of good efforts from the Senate. We'd like to see something get passed this year.

Got it. makes sense. Wishing Alan well in his endeavors.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Julien Dumoulin-Smith from Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, team. Nicely done yet again. Bigger and better. Just if I can needle you a little bit on how you think about the cadence of the 6 big gigawatt backlog here. First, has that been replenished here when you think about Project Neo folding into and moving forward here?

How do you think about actually seeing the timeline of some of this materialize? You talk about time to power. Just be very curious on what you're seeing out there. A lot of your peers talking about some pretty rapid activity out there. Again, obviously, well done on Project Neo, and here we are asking about the next and the timeline around it. Thank you.

Yeah, I'll start. I would just say, Julien, I wouldn't try to focus on precision with the 6 gigawatts that we've spoken to. I think order of magnitude, we still see that type of robust backlog out there.

I think more importantly, we're very focused on layering in projects in a way that work from an execution perspective, that work from a steady and predictable growth perspective, that complement the equipment and supply chain availability that we've secured in support of the projects John spoke to, and I'm sure we'll get deeper into the financing and making sure that we are being very thoughtful and disciplined with respect to the balance sheet.

Right now we see plenty of backlog to allow for us to effectively balance all of those factors and, you know, do more than we would hope to from a growth and kind of performance perspective.

The backlog remains, frankly, as robust. I would actually say the team does a great job of high-grading the backlog to make sure that we do have this bounty of opportunities, but we're being very disciplined in making sure that the projects really fit to where we have competitive advantage and strength, but also where it fits nicely into the growth cadence that we're looking to achieve.

I wouldn't try to do the math on, you know, the 6 gigawatts as much as to say that I think that is reflective of an order of magnitude that we still think is more than available for us to work through as we layer in projects.

Actually, if I can keep going on that, you alluded to it. I mean, what about creative financing solutions here, right? For PI. Obviously, you had some latitude here on the balance sheet as is, what are you evaluating? What are the structures? How do you think about the capacity here as it stands as you ratchet up further here? I'll pass it back to you.

Thanks, Julien. John Porter here. Appreciate that question. You know, obviously we are seeing leverage temporarily move modestly above our long-term target range of 3.5-4x. Of course, this is really being driven by the execution now on five of these high-quality, fast cycle power innovation projects.

The first thing I would really emphasize is that this is really a timing dynamic, where in 2028 we will see enormous earnings growth that will completely reset the leverage capacity of the company. In the meantime, I'd say we're being very intentional in preserving financing flexibility.

We're not going to rely on any single lever. We have multiple well-established options available to us. For example, we really have seen great interest from some really terrific potential partners around these power innovation projects. These structures are attractive.

They would allow us to recycle capital while retaining our strategic and operational roles where that makes sense. Overall, we remained very focused on executing within our overall capital allocation priorities. Obviously, dividend growth stays intact, and we're committed to returning leverage to our target range over time.

Stepping back, we feel really good about where we're at and our ability to fund this CapEx program efficiently and to continue to add to it. We do have multiple paths. We're not locked into any one solution. We expect the strong earnings growth profile of the business will naturally de-lever the balance sheet, especially as the projects come online in 2027 and 2028. As I mentioned earlier in my prepared comments, expect to hear more details on this about our specific financing plans here in the next couple of months.

Awesome. All right, stand by. Thanks, Chad. Thanks, John.

Our next question comes from Praneeth Satish from Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Thanks. Chad, I think you made a comment earlier that the project costs and efficiencies are improving for the power projects. Maybe in that context, could you provide an update of how much redundant capacity you think is appropriate for the future power projects and what you're doing for Neo?

Has that evolved relative to Socrates? I think Socrates is being built with about 50% kind of redundant capacity. I guess, are you seeing that ratio trend down with the more recent projects, or kind of waiting to see how Socrates performs before making any changes on that front?

Yeah. Thanks, Praneeth. I'd say a little bit of both. We are continually seeing kind of a more efficient combination of assets in order to meet the needs of the customer. I also would say, you know, we are in the middle effectively of starting the commissioning.

Well, we're in the middle of commissioning the first phase of Socrates, and I think we will learn a lot through that process. We do expect that as we bring Socrates online, we'll be able to create even more efficient operating modes and create more capacity as we, I think, prove up the fact that we've got plenty of redundancy. I think it's been a combination of both.

I will say that the team is also doing a great job, even as we've just been building out Socrates and then our follow-on projects, Aquila, Apollo. We continue to take lessons learned from.

Each of those projects and apply them to the new projects. You know, we continue to see that efficiency gain. I expect that, you know, it's like we see in a lot of different areas. You know, think about the efficiency curve of the upstream producer.

You know, it's very similar. I mean, these are the early days. We have to remind ourselves we're only really about a year into this program already announcing, you know, our fifth project. I think we're gonna continue to see pretty impressive efficiency gains over time.

Got you. Thank you. Maybe shifting gears to the transmission side. Can you talk about the opportunities that you're seeing in the Rockies and whether the Silver Spur expansion that you announced today could be the first of more projects on Northwest? I think you ran several open seasons last year. Any color on customer interest from that process and how and whether we should stand by for additional expansions there? Thanks.

Praneeth, this is Larry Larsen. I'll take that question. You are right. We initially went out with the Rockies Columbia Connector expansion open season last year. As we kind of mentioned in the prepared remarks that the Silver Spur, it's really the first phase as we started looking at all the market needs within Idaho as well as in the Pacific Northwest and Washington, Oregon.

The Idaho market was clearly mature and ready to move forward. I mean, it's hard to believe, Idaho is the second fastest-growing state from a population standpoint in the nation. The thing that they were lacking was additional infrastructure.

Excited to be able to get this first phase of what was originally the Rockies Columbia Connector project commercialized, and we're gonna progress forward with that project. Yeah, we still see interest both longer term in Idaho, but we're also still progressing discussions with our key customers within Washington and Oregon. Hopefully we'll see some progress on the second phase of that expansion project this year.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Ameet Thakkar from BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Just a couple more follow-ups on Neo if I may. Is the counterparty kind of the same that you have for Socrates the Younger and Socrates for this particular project?

Yeah, I mean, we're in a stage of the project where just from a confidentiality perspective, we're still not able to disclose the counterparty. As soon as we can, we'll be sure to do that.

Relative to, I guess the other projects from an air permitting standpoint, and whatever kind of regulatory approvals that maybe the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio would need to provide, where does that project stand relative to the others?

Excuse me, which project are you referring to?

Neo. Yeah, no, I mean, it's just in the early phases. We'll be filing for those permits here later this year as we progress forward now that we've got it commercialized.

Our next question comes from Brandon Bingham from Scotiabank. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. I wanted to maybe try to pry a little bit more on the financing side of things, hopefully from a different angle here. There have been a couple of deals announced recently for gas pipeline assets, and the chatter suggests the marks were quite healthy. In the past, you've looked to take advantage of sort of the disconnect between private market valuations. Just curious if there's any consideration in doing so again in light of these deals and the potential funding needs.

I think, this is John again, Brandon. I think right now what we're primarily focused on is really understanding what's possible in terms of partnering around the power innovation projects. Those projects have turned out to be, I think, highly attractive to some of these potential partners, just given the quality of the opportunity, the customers that are involved.

We've had some very productive management presentations with, again, some really terrific partners. We're very excited about the opportunity set there. Some of those partners, I think, could even perhaps provide an opportunity to enhance our opportunity set in the space as well.

That looks like a pretty fertile area for us in terms of being able to do something at size at a very attractive cost to capital with the right governance structure and, you know, again, perhaps even an ability to add to our opportunity set in the space. I think that's our main area of focus right now.

Like I said earlier, we've got a lot of different things that we could tap into. You know, a lot of that just depends on how fast these projects keep coming at us and how big those projects are. We are still trying to myself and the treasurer trying to make sure we stay ahead of the commercial teams and there's a lot out there. Yeah.

I think thematically, Brandon, it is consistent with, I think, where you were going. We are seeing a tremendous amount of interest in investing alongside us in these projects and in a way that we think will significantly enhance our economics from a cost of capital perspective.

Okay, great. Very helpful. Maybe just quickly looking at the Haynesville, wondering what some of the latest and greatest commentary you're hearing from producer customers in that basin, just in light of Henry Hub sitting comfortably below $3 right now, but knowing that the Gulf Coast LNG ramp is coming in quickly.

Yeah. Hi, this is Larry Larsen. I'll take that one. I mean, I think commentary we've kind of mentioned in the past that the producer is obviously cautious drilling into kind of the pricing dynamics right now.

Williams (WMB) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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