Google has signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Constellation Energy covering 3,590 megawatts of future electricity supply, including 890 megawatts of new nuclear capacity, as the company tries to secure enough power for its datacenter ambitions.
The deal, announced Tuesday, will see Constellation bring additional nuclear capacity online through targeted investments at multiple nuclear plants. The power company said the investments will fund upgrades to at least 11 existing plants across Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, a process known as uprating, which extracts more output from existing reactors.
"By modernizing and upgrading turbines, steam generators, and digital control systems at operating plants, uprates deliver substantial capacity gains without the multi-year timelines or interconnection bottlenecks associated with greenfield construction," Constellation said in a statement.
The remaining 2,700 megawatts covered by the agreement will come from other, unspecified sources. Constellation expects to spend $4.3 billion to fulfill its side of the deal, with the first uprated reactor scheduled to come online in 2028.
The agreement comes as Google is on track to spend as much as $205 billion on datacenters and compute this year, and faces the same problem as its rivals: all that computing power is useless without electricity to run it. Microsoft has tapped Constellation to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1, expected online as early as next year, and Meta is working with the company to save a nuclear plant in Illinois. Meta has said its nuclear and clean energy commitments now total 6.6 gigawatts, though that figure depends heavily on the successful rollout of small modular reactors, an unproven technology.
Analysis
Why This Matters
- AI datacenter buildout is colliding with power grid limits. This deal shows how hyperscale cloud providers are locking in dedicated energy supplies rather than waiting on grid upgrades.
- Uprating existing reactors can deliver carbon-free power faster than building new plants, which matters as datacenter electricity use surges.
- Google is not acting alone: Microsoft and Meta have struck similar nuclear arrangements, pointing to an industry-wide shift.
Background
Datacenters consume enormous amounts of electricity, and the recent AI boom has sharply increased demand. Nuclear power offers steady, carbon-free baseload electricity, but new plants are expensive and slow to build. Uprating, or increasing the output of existing reactors, has emerged as a faster alternative, which is the approach at the center of this deal.
Key Perspectives
Google and Constellation: They frame uprating as a practical way to add substantial capacity without the multi-year timelines or interconnection bottlenecks of building new plants. For Google, securing power has become as important as securing compute.
Microsoft and Meta: Their parallel work with Constellation reflects the same calculation across the industry: nuclear is one of the few carbon-free power sources available at the scale and reliability that AI datacenters require.
Critics and skeptics: Nuclear uprating still faces regulatory and technical hurdles, and cost overruns are common in the industry. Meta's larger clean energy target depends on small modular reactors, a technology that remains unproven at commercial scale, and older plants carry ongoing safety and waste concerns.
What to Watch
- Whether Constellation completes its first uprated reactor by 2028 and delivers within the $4.3 billion budget.
- The source of the remaining 2,700 megawatts, which has not been specified.
- Whether regulators approve the plant upgrades, and how the Three Mile Island restart and Meta's Illinois deal progress.