Net energy (NE) in poultry is regarded as a more precise energy system compared to conventional apparent metabolizable energy (AME) due to its ability to consider the energy lost as heat increment from nutrient metabolism, which averages 25% of AME and is variable with feed characteristics. However, unlike pigs, NE is not yet implemented in poultry nutrition. A study was conducted to measure the NE value of 23 diets that were highly variable in terms of chemical composition (% dry matter; 33.6 to 55.3% for starch; 20.8 to 28.4% for crude protein (CP), 2.7 to 10.6% for fat (EE) and 7.0 to 17.2% for NDF) to establish NE prediction equations for broiler feeds. Diets were prepared with 13 major ingredients (wheat, corn, paddy rice, broken rice, cassava, full-fat soybean, soybean meal, canola meal, animal protein, rice bran, wheat bran, palm kernel meal, palm kernel oil) at various and independent inclusion levels to calculate robust prediction equations between NE content and analyte constituents of ingredients. All diets met the amino acid requirements of the birds. The diets were fed to male Ross 308 broilers kept in 12 open-circuit respiratory chambers from 17 to 22 days of age (4 birds per cage) after 5 days of adaptation for measurement of growth performance, diet AME content and heat production and calculation of diet NE value. Performance of birds (89 g/d BW gain on average), diet AME (3644 kcal/kg dry matter on average; range: 3356 to 4003) and AME/GE (79.4% on average) were as expected. The NE/AME ratio averaged 76.6% (range: 74.7 to 78.7%) and increased with EE and decreased with CP in the feed. Accordingly, diet NE value was positively related to AME and EE contents and negatively to CP level; NDF also had a significant negative contribution to NE content. Starch had no significant impact on NE prediction. The NE equations generated in the current study show good agreement with previous studies on poultry and pigs and were also able to predict the NE value of the ingredients in our trial. Validation of the NE equation proved that NE-based broiler diets reduced feed cost without negative impact on growth performance when compared to AME-based diets. A series of subsequent trials are scheduled to achieve the optimum NE level and respective inclusion of lysine, other essential amino acids, as well as crude protein. As NE system favors formulating low CP diets with supplementation of synthetic amino acids, it is also planned to check meat yield and carcass quality during the trials.