The 25 biggest BEAD winners so far

Last verified: 26 September 2026. Flip News's first quarterly data story ranks the largest awards in the US$42.45bn Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment programme — as they have actually been published. Only two states have put provider-level award lists in public so far: Texas (17 final subgrantee contracts) and Louisiana (12 announced Benefit-of-the-Bargain awards). Everything on this page is drawn from our verified BEAD awards dataset release 2026.09.23.1 (29 rows, US$1,565,869,347 across 335,671 promised locations) — no other numbers enter this story.

What the chart shows

Two awards dominate everything published so far. 4 IP Technology and Media LLC, d.b.a. Nexstream leads Texas with US$401,831,807 for 32,404 locations, and the Louisiana Local Fiber Consortium leads Louisiana with US$378,042,581 for 68,535 locations. Together they account for US$779,874,388 — just over half (50.2%) of the US$1,553,895,645 in the top 25, which itself covers 99.2% of all the published dollars in the dataset. Of the top 25, 15 are Texas final contracts and 10 are Louisiana announced awards.

Dividing each row's own award figure by its own promised-location figure gives an implied cost per location — the spread is enormous. The priciest rows are 4 IP Technology and Media LLC, d.b.a. Nexstream at about US$12,401/location and Lyte Fiber LLC at about US$12,000/location; the cheapest is SpaceX in Louisiana at about US$750/location. These are not value-for-money verdicts: terrain, how many of the locations are truly unserved, and the technology mix (many states have not published per-provider technology at all) all move the number. But the gap is the right question for the next quarter's story.

A note of caution on Texas: in August 2026 the Texas Comptroller paused all BEAD disbursements pending an audit over reported Starlink favouritism (Fierce Network), so even the "final" Texas contracts carry real-world uncertainty. Louisiana's rows are the state's announcements — not yet signed subgrantee agreements. Nothing here is presented as an official award list from either state; the per-row sources say what each figure is.

All 29 published awards

The chart shows the top 25. The table below gives all 29 rows in the dataset, ranked, with per-row sources and verification labels — exactly as they appear in the BEAD Money Tracker.

Methodology

This is a snapshot of dataset release 2026.09.23.1 (schema v1.0.0) as last verified 26 September 2026. The chart ranks all rows in the release by amount_usd and shows the top 25; it was generated by tools/charts/hbar_chart.py, our reusable static-SVG chart pipeline, which refuses to render if any value is missing, non-numeric, or negative — if the data can't be verified, no chart ships. Implied dollars-per-location figures are each row's own amount_usd divided by its own locations_promised, computed from the rows themselves; no external denominators were used. "Not published per provider" means the state has not published a per-provider technology breakdown — nothing was guessed.

Coverage is the story's biggest caveat: as of publication, Texas and Louisiana are the only states with publishable provider-level lists. California, Florida and others have no final award list in public, so they are absent — not zero. When more states publish, the next quarterly story will rerun the ranking; this page will not be silently rewritten. Corrections route through the corrections log.

Download

Chart data as CSV: 2026-q3-biggest-bead-winners.csv (29 rows, ranked; includes the per-row source titles and URLs). The chart itself: SVG. The full dataset release that feeds this story: awards.csv · awards.json · release notes.

More BEAD data: the BEAD Money Tracker, the county awards database, and the BEAD timeline: 2021–2026.