Google parent Alphabet is close to a multi-year agreement to buy nuclear energy from Constellation Energy worth $1 billion or more over the life of the contract, Bloomberg reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the discussions. The deal could be announced as soon as this week. Neither company commented.
The exact scale and location of the nuclear capacity in the agreement could not be determined. What is clear is the driver: data centers built for artificial intelligence workloads need more electricity than the US grid can comfortably supply, and hyperscalers have moved from buying clean energy certificates to contracting actual reactor output.
Constellation is the largest nuclear reactor operator in the United States, running the biggest fleet in the country after spinning off from Exelon in 2022. For the company, a hyperscaler contract of this size extends a run of commercial wins that began when tech demand started lifting power prices for its plants.
The rush for firm power
Google is not the first to move. Microsoft signed a 20-year deal to restart a reactor unit at Three Mile Island, now renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center, with output reserved for its data centers. Amazon bought a data center campus next to the Susquehanna nuclear plant and has invested in small modular reactor developer X-energy. Meta ran a tender for nuclear capacity and signed agreements with several developers last year.
The logic for all of them is the same. Wind and solar are cheap but intermittent, and a data center that runs around the clock cannot run on intermittent supply alone. Nuclear is the only proven source of firm, carbon-free generation at the scale these campuses need, which is why reactor operators suddenly find themselves in a seller’s market after two decades of flat electricity demand.
Renewables advocates have pushed back, arguing that hyperscalers should still fund new wind, solar and storage alongside nuclear, and that long-term reactor contracts can crowd out other clean energy procurement. The deals also take years to deliver. New reactors are typically a decade-plus build, so most of the current wave involves existing capacity or restarts rather than new construction.
| Company | Nuclear arrangement |
|---|---|
| Near $1 billion+ multi-year purchase from Constellation, per Bloomberg | |
| Microsoft | 20-year restart deal for Three Mile Island Unit 1, now Crane Clean Energy Center |
| Amazon | Data center co-located at Susquehanna, investor in X-energy SMRs |
| Meta | Nuclear tender, multiple developer agreements signed in 2025 |
What a billion buys
A $1 billion multi-year commitment is smaller than Microsoft’s Three Mile Island contract, which analysts valued in the range of $1.5 to 2 billion over its life, but it is large enough to matter for both sides. For Google, it hedges electricity cost risk for AI capacity at a moment when power prices in several regional grids have risen faster than the company’s renewable portfolio can offset.
The contract also signals where the AI buildout bottleneck has moved. Chip supply, once the constraint, has eased as Nvidia and its suppliers scale output. Power interconnection queues, transformer shortages and grid permitting are now the binding limits on how fast data center capacity can grow, and tech companies are spending directly to bypass them.
For Constellation, hyperscaler contracts provide the revenue visibility that shareholders had stopped expecting from a merchant power generator. The stock has been one of the strongest performers in the S&P 500 since the AI power theme took hold, and each new data center deal has added to the premium. Long-dated contracts at premium prices also make it easier to justify refueling extensions, power uprates at existing units and, eventually, new construction.
Regulators are watching. Utility commissions in several states have questioned whether co-located data centers at nuclear plants raise costs for ordinary ratepayers, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has wrestled with how to price such arrangements. A direct bilateral contract like the one Google is negotiating sidesteps part of that fight, since it does not require a tariff change, but the political question of who pays for grid upgrades is not going away.
Energy analysts have also noted the arithmetic problem underneath the headlines. Every hyperscaler signing nuclear contracts does not create new electrons if the capacity is already spoken for by utilities under existing arrangements. Redirecting reactor output to tech campuses shifts supply between buyers rather than adding to it, which is why the real test of this wave will be how much new generation actually gets built. Restart projects like Crane and uprates at existing plants add some supply, but the gap between announced AI demand and confirmed new capacity remains wide.
An announcement this week would put the deal in front of investors before Q3 earnings season, when Alphabet and other hyperscalers are expected to update their capital expenditure guidance. Data center spending is the largest single line in that guidance for most of them, and electricity contracts are becoming a visible part of it.
Google has already signed nuclear agreements with Kairos Power for small modular reactors, so Constellation would be the second leg of a two-track strategy: SMRs for the 2030s, existing fleet capacity for now. Whatever the final terms, the direction of travel is set. Power procurement has moved from a facilities problem to a board-level line item, and reactor fleets built for a slower economy are suddenly the scarcest asset in the AI supply chain.