On Monday, Florida-based NextEra Energy, North America’s largest investor-owned electric utility, announced it had entered an agreement to combine with Dominion Energy, creating the world’s largest regulated electric utility business.
The $66.8 billion all-stock transaction is the latest evidence of growing consolidation in the US public energy and utilities sector to meet the exponential demand for power to fuel the AI buildout.
Goldman Sachs estimates in a February report that global data center capacity is set to reach around 122 gigawatts by the end of 2030, with demand coming from both hyperscalers—massive cloud service providers like Microsoft, Google and Meta—and wholesale operators, similar to data center real estate developers.
That represents a nearly 107% increase from current data center capacity.
Energy companies such as NextEra and Dominion, which build infrastructure for hyperscalers and then sell the power back to them, are employing a strategy of inorganic growth to meet this demand.
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Monday’s acquisition gives NextEra access to “data center alley”—a region of Northern Virginia that hosts the world’s largest concentration of such infrastructure—via its Dominion Energy Virginia subsidiary.
NextEra also owns one of the largest energy infrastructure development entities in the country, NextEra Energy Resources. In March, the business won a contract with the US Department of Commerce to build and operate up to 10 gigawatts of natural gas-generated power for large-load customers, such as data center operators.
In October, NextEra announced a collaboration with Google to restart Iowa’s only nuclear facility, the Duane Arnold Energy Center. Once operational, Google plans to buy the power generated at the site to operate its data centers.
At the end of 2025, NextEra was targeting 15 gigawatts of new power generation for data center hubs by 2035.
The power and utilities sector is highly fragmented due to its heavily regulated structure. Each power provider must comply with different state and local public utility commission rules, a reality that could drive more consolidation soon, according to an EY analysis.
Attracted by this fragmentation, private equity is increasingly circling public utilities to gain exposure to the AI supply chain.
Five of the seven largest ever PE-backed purchases of power generation businesses were either completed or announced in the past three years, PitchBook previously reported.
That includes the pending $33 billion take-private of energy behemoth AES Corporation by a consortium of investors, announced in March, and Blackstone’s agreement to acquire TXNM Energy, the holding company for the Texas-New Mexico Power Company, an electric utility that provides power to the west, north central and the Gulf Coast of Texas.
