NextEra Energy is the world's largest listed utility, founded in 1925 as a local energy supplier in Florida. In the 21st century it reinvented itself as America's leading developer of wind and solar farms; with Donald Trump railing against "windmills", the company has more recently rebalanced its efforts towards natural gas, nuclear power and battery storage. Its boss is John Ketchum, who declared a "golden age of power demand" thanks to AI.
In October 2025 NextEra agreed to reopen a 615-megawatt nuclear plant in Iowa to power Google's data centres there. Soon after it announced 2,500MW-worth of generation and storage contracts with Meta. Since 2021 NextEra has increased its annual capital expenditure by more than half, spending $25bn in 2025. Rating agencies want at least 70% of a utility's business to be in regulated electricity markets to provide stable cashflows; NextEra's unregulated business has been growing at roughly double the rate of its regulated arm, putting it close to the 70% floor.
On May 18th 2026 NextEra announced it would acquire Dominion Energy, a smaller power provider based in Virginia whose territory covers the largest data-centre cluster in the world. The deal values Dominion at $124bn and the combined company at $420bn including debt. Dominion is weighed down by $50bn in debt; nearly all of its business is regulated. The combined firm could spend more than $220bn in capital expenditure between 2027 and 2030, according to Fitch. NextEra promised the deal would "drive affordability" and that Dominion's customers would receive $2.25bn-worth of bill credits over the two years following completion. The firms have promised an 18-month timeline for the merger but it must win over state regulators in Virginia and the Carolinas. NextEra previously sought to combine with Entergy in 2000, Constellation Energy in 2005, Hawaiian Electric in 2014 and Duke Energy in 2020; each was rebuffed or scuppered by regulators. Virginia's Democratic governor Abigail Spanberger campaigned on making data-centre operators "pay their own way".
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