Meta and Google turn to NextEra to feed insatiable datacenter power hunger
The Chocolate Factory will also put its AI to work inside one of America’s biggest utilities
NextEra Energy on Monday tightened its grip on hyperscaler power demand, adding 2.5 GW of new renewable projects for Meta while deepening its partnership with Google, which already covers about 3.5 GW of capacity.
Taken together, Meta and Google now touch roughly 18 percent of the 33.4 GW of generating capacity in operation at NextEra Energy's subsidiary, NextEra Energy Resources, underscoring both the growing appetite for datacenter power and the consolidation of supply among hyperscale customers.
Publicly traded NextEra Energy is one of the country's largest power companies and has about 72 GW of net generation and storage capacity. It owns Florida Power & Light, which serves more than 6 million customer accounts, of which 91 percent either use natural gas or nuclear power to meet demand.
It also owns NextEra Energy Resources – its clean energy arm – which has 35 GW of capacity that is dedicated to renewable energy, using wind turbines for 64 percent of its capacity, nuclear for 17 percent, and solar power for 15 percent. That subsidiary has two operational nuclear power plants and a third decommissioned plant that is being brought back online.
NextEra’s agreement with Meta represents a combined 2.5 GW of power across 13 projects nationally, which will be energized between 2026 and 2028, according to a statement. About 2.1 GW of the capacity will come from nine solar projects that will take shape across markets in Texas, New Mexico, Indiana, and other states. The 2.5 GW total is in addition to the nearly 500 MW of operating projects Meta already supports.
With Google Cloud, NextEra announced Monday that it is leaning on the company not just as a power customer, but as a software provider.
The companies plan to work together to create and sell digital operational platforms for power companies.
One will focus on NextEra’s power delivery using weather prediction analytics to better meter power through aging power infrastructure. To do that, NextEra said it will join its own data with Google’s latest forecasting models, TimesFM 2.5 and WeatherNext 2.
The power company will also integrate Google’s generative and agentic AI capabilities with NextEra operational data to more accurately predict equipment issues, navigate supply chain bottlenecks, and schedule work crews.
The first commercial product will be available for purchase on Google Cloud Marketplace by mid-2026, according to the statement the companies released on Monday.
NextEra and Google are also planning to work together to “rapidly” develop “multi-gigawatt” datacenter campuses across the US. They are now building three facilities and have identified other locations for new datacenters and expansions to existing projects.
Earlier this year, Google and NextEra Energy announced a plan to restart the shuttered Duane Arnold nuclear power plant in Iowa, a 615-MW facility that NextEra aims to bring back online, as part of a broader relationship in which the two companies already have about 3.5 GW of capacity in operation or under contract.
NextEra had shut the plant down in 2020 after its primary customer backed out of a long-term power purchase agreement that should have funded the plant until December 2025, according to SEC filings. NextEra had anticipated that the plant could operate until its license expired in 2034, the filings stated.
Instead it absorbed a $258 million impairment charge, shuttered the facility in 2020, put the fuel into on-site dry storage awaiting Department of Energy pick up, and was four years into decommissioning the plant, according to the company’s annual reports.
In January, NextEra filed plans with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to turn the plant back on. It announced Google as the facility's primary customer in October. ®