This week, two of the most powerful companies on earth made a bet that tells you more about the future of AI than any earnings call or analyst note published this year.
Amazon signed a 20-year, $3 billion power deal.
Then Google signed a 20-year, $4.3 billion power deal.
Both with the same company.
Both for nuclear energy.
Both announced within days of each other.
I believe it’s a coordinated signal from two of the largest AI infrastructure builders in the world and if you understand what problem they’re actually solving, you understand why the company on the other side of both deals might be one of the most important stocks in the AI trade right now.
The problem nobody talks about at AI conferences
Every conversation about AI focuses on chips. Models. Data. Software. The arms race between Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and the rest.
Nobody talks about electricity.
But electricity is the constraint that’s quietly becoming the most important variable in the entire AI buildout. Data centres don’t run on code.
They run on power – enormous, continuous, around-the-clock quantities of it that are straining regional electricity grids in ways that were unimaginable five years ago.
The PJM grid, which covers 13 states from Illinois to New Jersey, including the heart of Northern Virginia’s Data Centre Alley where much of America’s AI infrastructure lives, has become increasingly strained and increasingly expensive.
Utilities are warning that demand is outpacing supply. States are pushing back. Voters are asking why their electricity bills are rising to subsidise trillion-dollar technology companies.
This is AI’s inconvenient truth. The models are getting smarter. The power to run them is getting harder to find.
Why nuclear?
The answer isn’t solar. It isn’t wind. Both are intermittent. They produce power when the sun shines and the wind blows, which isn’t the same schedule as a data centre that needs electricity every second of every day.
Nuclear power is the opposite. Baseload electricity. Running around the clock, regardless of weather, season or time of day. Producing zero carbon emissions. And, crucially for the politics of this moment, perceived as credibly clean in a way that coal or gas-fired generation simply can’t be.
The politics matter because AI companies are facing a genuine public backlash. Governors who were competing to attract data centres eighteen months ago are now proposing safeguards against them.
If there’s political support for data centres at all, it comes with one consistent caveat: the big tech companies have to pay their own way. They can’t simply plug into the public grid, drive up costs for households and walk away.
These nuclear deals deliver exactly that. Amazon and Google are funding upgrades to existing power plants. They’re paying for the capacity themselves. They’re adding power to regional grids that are strained – not just to their own facilities. That’s the political cover that allows the buildout to continue.
The company on both sides of the table
Constellation Energy (Nasdaq: CEG) is America’s largest producer of clean, carbon-free electricity and its largest nuclear fleet operator.
This week, it became the preferred power supplier for both Amazon and Google.
Amazon’s deal: $3 billion, 20 years, to fund upgrades and expansion at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Maryland. The planned addition of 190 megawatts of new capacity would power approximately 150,000 homes (or a couple of data centres) running continuously around the clock.
Google’s deal: $4.3 billion, 20 years, part of a larger 3,590-megawatt contract that will add 890 megawatts of capacity across six nuclear plants in Illinois, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Combined this week: $7.3 billion in contracted revenue. Forty years of weighted average contract duration. Two of the most creditworthy counterparties in corporate history on the other side of both agreements.
The honest caveat, and why it doesn’t change the investment case
None of this power arrives tomorrow.
At Calvert Cliffs, the Amazon-funded upgrades won’t come online until 2030 at the earliest. The Google deal involves modernising turbines, steam generators and digital control systems – work that won’t be complete before 2028. Nuclear projects are complex, regulated and slow by nature.
Nevertheless, Amazon and Google didn’t announce these deals because nuclear power is fashionable. They announced them because they’ve run the numbers on what AI requires (in terms of continuous, reliable, carbon-free electricity) and they’ve concluded that nuclear is the only credible answer at the scale they need.
The AI infrastructure boom has been a Nvidia story. A hyperscaler story. A data centre story.
It’s about to become a power story.
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