Google signs $4.3 billion nuclear deal with Constellation as power runs short

Google just locked up 3,590 megawatts from Constellation Energy, its second major nuclear power pact in just over two weeks. The deal shows how far Big Tech will now go to keep AI data centers running.

Google and Constellation Energy announced a power agreement on October 6 covering 3,590 megawatts in the PJM grid, the largest electricity market in the country. Constellation said the deal unlocks more than $4.3 billion in new investment, most of it going toward uprating 11 nuclear reactors across Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey by a combined 890 megawatts. Google signed a 20-year purchase agreement for that nuclear power. It also signed a separate long-term supply deal for another 2,700 megawatts not tied to any specific plant. The first upgraded reactor output is due in 2028.

It's Google's second big nuclear swing in just over two weeks, and that's the part worth sitting with. Constellation isn't restarting a dead plant here, it's squeezing more output out of reactors that never stopped running, which is cheaper and faster than building anything new. Frankly, that's the whole story of how Big Tech is approaching power right now: take whatever generation already exists, and pay whatever it costs to lock it down before someone else does.

NextEra Energy has been running the same playbook with Google since last year, and the scale of it is worth laying out plainly. In October 2025, Google signed a 25-year power purchase agreement to buy power from the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Palo, Iowa, while Central Iowa Power Cooperative agreed to buy the remaining output on the same terms. That's a 615-megawatt plant that's sat dark since a 2020 derecho wrecked its cooling towers. NextEra is taking full ownership of the plant now: it's buying out the Central Iowa Power Cooperative and Corn Belt Power Cooperative's combined 30% stake. The Department of Energy closed an up to $1.9 billion loan in September 2026 to help finance the restart. NextEra expects the reactor back online by the first quarter of 2029, with Google planning as many as six data centers nearby.

Nuclear alone won't cover it. In December 2025, NextEra announced it would partner with Google Cloud to build at least three gigawatt-scale data center campuses. Each one comes paired with its own dedicated generation, so computing capacity isn't stuck waiting on grid interconnection queues that can run years long. That same month, NextEra agreed to buy Symmetry Energy Solutions from Energy Capital Partners: roughly $805 million in cash plus about $341 million in working capital adjustments. The deal closed in January 2026. Symmetry supplies natural gas to 5,500 commercial and industrial customers across 34 states, and NextEra wants that pipeline reach to feed the gas plants it's now racing to build.

One of those plants is a joint project with ExxonMobil: a 1.2-gigawatt natural gas facility in the Southeastern US, paired with carbon capture technology designed to trap more than 90% of its emissions. The companies picked up a 2,500-acre site near Exxon's existing CO2 pipeline network and were marketing it to a hyperscale data center operator as of early 2026, though no customer had signed on yet.

None of this is charity, and none of it is really optional anymore. Prices paid by utilities for guaranteed power have gone from $28.92 per megawatt-day in the 2024/25 auction to $325 per megawatt-day in the latest completed auction for 2028/29, after peaking at $333.44 per megawatt-day for 2027/28, according to PJM's own capacity auction results. That's still an increase of more than 1,000% from the 2024/25 level. PJM has said data center demand continues to far outstrip new supply, while Monitoring Analytics, PJM's independent market monitor, has tied a large share of recent capacity costs to data center load. That bill doesn't stay with Google or Constellation. It lands on ordinary ratepayers across 13 states and Washington, D.C., where PJM has estimated consumer bill impacts from the 2026/27 auction at 1.5% to 5% depending on the state.

So the restarts and the reactor uprates and the new gas plants aren't really about clean energy commitments anymore, not primarily. They're about hyperscalers deciding they can't trust the grid to have enough electrons when they need them. And they've decided it's cheaper to go build and finance the power plants themselves than to wait in line behind everyone else. Nuclear operators that were planning to decommission aging reactors a decade ago are now fielding 20-year contracts from companies that didn't exist in their market a few years back. That's a real shift in who holds the power in the US power sector, and it happened in about eighteen months.

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