Williams Companies Lines Up $5.34 Billion Power JV With Blackstone
Williams Companies struck a $5.34 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Apollo and KKR that the company said would lower its 2026 leverage guidance to roughly 3.6 times debt-to-Adjusted EBITDA.
Williams Companies (WMB) will form a $5.34 billion Power Innovation joint venture with Blackstone, Apollo and KKR, under which the three firms will take a 49% noncontrolling equity interest in exchange for funding $4.4 billion of growth capital expenditures plus roughly $900 million in additional consideration. The natural-gas pipeline and power-infrastructure operator had disclosed no such partnership in any of its four prior earnings-related releases, which instead covered a bond offering, board appointments and a CEO transition.
The transaction changed the company's balance-sheet math as much as its strategy. Williams' 2026 leverage guidance midpoint now stands at approximately 3.6 times debt-to-Adjusted EBITDA, down from the long-term target range of 3.5 to 4.0 times the company had maintained, because the Blackstone deal will receive full equity treatment rather than being consolidated as debt. No prior release had included a leverage-ratio target at all, making the metric itself new information as much as the improvement it recorded.
Williams reiterated its 2026 Adjusted EBITDA guidance at the upper half of an $8.05 billion to $8.35 billion range, alongside growth capital expenditure guidance of $7.0 billion to $7.6 billion and maintenance capital expenditure of $850 million to $950 million. All other per-share guidance was left unchanged, and the company characterized the update as an affirmation of its existing outlook rather than a raise.
The scale of the Power Innovation opportunity set also expanded in the disclosure. Williams put its Power Innovation backlog at more than 6 gigawatts in the anchor release, a figure that sat alongside a chief executive quote citing "more than 2.6 gigawatts announced". Neither prior-quarter release had included comparable gigawatt figures, leaving the backlog as a newly quantified data point rather than one with an established trend line to compare against.
The joint venture arrived without the debt-market activity that had characterized Williams' two most recent quarters. The company priced $2.75 billion of senior notes in January 2026 and $1.5 billion in June 2025, but neither the anchor release nor the prior quarter's July 2026 release disclosed any new debt offering. The equity-funded structure of the Blackstone transaction, rather than a new bond sale, appeared to be doing the work of financing the growth capital program this quarter.
Governance disclosures, which had shifted focus each of the past several quarters, were absent from the anchor release. The prior quarter had added two independent directors, Helms and Turner, expanding the board to 12 members with 11 independent, while an earlier release in May 2025 had disclosed the transition of Zamarin succeeding Armstrong as chief executive and chairman. Neither board composition nor leadership metrics recurred in the July 2026 release, leaving the joint venture and its leverage implications as the quarter's defining disclosures.