Google has signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Constellation Energy to secure 3,590 megawatts of future energy supply, including nearly a gigawatt of new nuclear capacity, to fuel its datacenters. The deal involves targeted investments across 11 existing nuclear plants in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey to unlock 890 megawatts of additional capacity through plant uprates.
Upgrading Turbines and Digital Controls to Avoid Greenfield Delays
The race to power energy-hungry AI hardware has forced hyperscalers to look past traditional grid expansion. Greenfield nuclear construction involves multi-year timelines and interconnection bottlenecks. Enhancing operating plants via the modernization of digital control systems, steam generators, and turbines allows uprates to provide significant capacity increases while bypassing the prolonged schedules and grid connection hurdles tied to brand-new facility development.
Constellation expects to spend $4.3 billion to fulfill its side of the agreement. The power company plans to complete its first uprated reactor by 2028.
Google is on track to spend as much as $205 billion on datacenters and compute this year. That capital expenditure remains useless if it can’t secure power to make its servers and GPUs work.
Big Tech Scrambles for Atomic Energy Supplies
Google is not the sole company rushing to lock down sufficient electricity to prevent its artificial intelligence projects from going without power. Microsoft tapped Constellation to reignite the Three Mile Island Unit 1 reactor, which is expected to come online as early as next year.
Meta is also working with Constellation to save a doomed nuclear plant in Illinois. Meta has stated that its clean energy and nuclear pledges reach a combined 6.6 gigawatts, though achieving that total relies heavily on the widespread deployment of small modular reactors, which are an untested variety of compact atomic power stations.
Of the 3,590 megawatts secured in the Google deal, the remaining 2,700 megawatts will come from other unspecified sources.
