Google signs a 3.6 GW power deal with Constellation, including 890 MW of new nuclear capacity

Google has signed one of the largest power deals any tech company has struck so far. On Tuesday, 6 October 2026, Google and Constellation Energy announced an agreement that covers 3,590 megawatts of electricity on PJM, the biggest power grid in the United States. The headline part is 890 megawatts of brand new nuclear capacity. It will not come from a new reactor. It will come from upgrading reactors that are already running, a process the industry calls an "uprate".

The reason this shows up on an AI news site is simple. Google says the deal is "driven by Google's data center growth", and data centers for AI training and inference are the fastest growing source of new electricity demand in the US right now. Whoever secures reliable power secures the right to build more compute. Google just locked in a big piece of it for the next two decades.

What Google and Constellation actually agreed

The press release from Constellation and a blog post by Amanda Peterson Corio, who leads data center energy at Google, give a clear picture of the structure. These are the points on the record.

• 890 MW of new nuclear capacity. Google signed a 20 year power purchase agreement, or PPA, for 890 megawatts that will come from upgrades at 11 Constellation nuclear units in Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Google's blog says the 11 reactors sit at six operating plants.
• 2,700 MW from the existing fleet. On top of that, the two companies signed a 15 year energy supply agreement for another 2,700 megawatts in PJM. According to CNBC, this power is not tied to a specific plant. Constellation describes it as revenue certainty that keeps its existing plants economically viable.
• More than 4.3 billion dollars of investment. Constellation will spend the money on new equipment and technology at the plants. The companies say the project sustains roughly 4,400 existing jobs and creates about 7,200 construction jobs during the build.
• Timeline. The first upgraded unit is expected to deliver power by 2028. Google says all 890 megawatts will be on the grid before the end of 2032.
• AI on the other side of the meter. Constellation will use Google Cloud and Gemini Enterprise under an expanded five year technology agreement, with agent based workflows for planning, plant operations and the security of its operational networks.
• More to come. The companies also agreed on a framework to look for new clean generation, storage and demand response projects across the US, starting with PJM.

What a nuclear uprate is

An uprate is the least glamorous way to get more nuclear power, and that is exactly why it is attractive. Instead of building a new plant, the operator modernizes the parts of an existing one that limit its output: turbines, steam generators and digital control systems. Better efficiency means the same reactor produces more electricity for the grid.

Google argues that "the fastest new megawatt is often the one that can be provided by existing infrastructure." A new large reactor in the US takes many years of licensing and construction, and the last ones came in far over budget. An uprate uses a site that already has a license, a grid connection, trained staff and local acceptance. Constellation says uprates avoid "the multi-year timelines or interconnection bottlenecks" of building from scratch.

The scale is not small either. According to Constellation, the 890 megawatts equal the output of several small modular reactors or one large conventional reactor. Google's blog uses almost the same comparison and says the capacity arrives "years quicker" than a new build.

Only a quarter of the deal is new power

It helps to separate the two halves of the 3,590 megawatts, because they do very different things.

The 890 megawatts are additional. They do not exist today, and they will only exist because Google signed a long contract that makes the investment safe for Constellation. That is the part both companies keep calling "entirely new" capacity.

The 2,700 megawatts are different. That electricity already flows from Constellation's fleet today. Google buys it under a financial agreement, which gives Constellation stable income for 15 years. It is still important for Google, because it guarantees supply, but it does not add a single megawatt to the grid by itself. Headlines about a "3.6 GW nuclear deal" are therefore a bit generous. The honest summary is: a large supply contract plus a meaningful amount of new nuclear power on top.

Why PJM is the battleground

PJM Interconnection runs the grid for 13 states in the Mid Atlantic and Midwest and serves 67 million people, according to Google. It is also home to one of the densest clusters of data centers in the world, and the strain is showing. Capacity prices in PJM have risen sharply in recent auctions, and local politicians increasingly ask why households should pay for grid upgrades that tech companies need.

PJM management has responded with a proposal that CNBC describes in blunt terms: data center customers would have to either bring their own power or accept being cut off from the grid remotely during peak demand. Google and Constellation explicitly present their deal as an answer to that "Bring Your Own Power" proposal. The message is that Google adds its own supply instead of taking capacity away from everyone else.

Google also stresses cost. The blog says other grid customers "bear none of the associated costs" of the uprates, and the press release links the deal to the White House Ratepayer Protection Pledge, which, as the name says, is about keeping data center growth from raising household power bills. There is also a flexibility element: the agreement includes load shaping and demand response, so Google can reduce non critical consumption when the grid is under stress.

Google's growing nuclear portfolio

This is not Google's first nuclear move. With the Constellation contract, Google says it has now enabled more than 1.5 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity in the US from uprates and restarts of existing plants.

The other pieces, as listed by Google:

• Iowa. Together with NextEra Energy, Google is restarting the Duane Arnold Energy Center, which brings more than 600 megawatts of nuclear power back online.
• Georgia. An agreement with Georgia Power supports uprates at four reactor units. Google expects about 900 million dollars in benefits for ratepayers there.
• Tennessee. With Kairos Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority, Google is working on advanced reactors and investing in Oak Ridge.

The US Department of Energy has set a goal of 5 gigawatts of extra nuclear capacity by 2030 from uprates and restarts of the existing fleet. Google says its agreements are expected to deliver nearly 25 percent of that goal by the end of the decade. The press release also ties the new deal to the federal UPRISE program, which encourages public private collaboration to get more output from existing reactors.

Google is not alone in this race. CNBC points out that Constellation already agreed to restart its Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania to supply Microsoft data centers. Constellation's own news page shows another recent 20 year agreement with Amazon that adds 190 megawatts of nuclear capacity at Calvert Cliffs in Maryland. The largest AI companies are now among the most important customers of the US nuclear industry.

The AI angle inside the power plant

There is a second, smaller story in the announcement. Constellation will build Gemini Enterprise agent workflows into its operations. The first three areas are site selection and permitting work for the uprates, monitoring the health of plant equipment and planning outages, and securing operational technology networks, many of which are air gapped and connected to the bulk power system.

This is a neat loop. Google sells AI tools to the company that will produce the electricity for Google's AI data centers, and it argues those tools will help bring that electricity online faster. It is also a sensitive use case. Nuclear plants are among the most tightly regulated sites in the world, so it will be interesting to see how much of the work AI agents actually do, and how much stays with human engineers and regulators.

What is still open

A few things are not in the announcements:

• Price. Neither company disclosed what Google pays per megawatt hour, or the total value of the contracts. The 4.3 billion dollar figure is Constellation's investment, not Google's payment.
• Which plants get how much. The press release names three states and 11 units, but no split of the 890 megawatts per plant.
• Regulatory approval. Uprates need approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The timeline to 2032 assumes those approvals and the supply chain for large components go smoothly.
• What happens after 2032. The PPA runs for 20 years and the supply deal for 15. Google's AI demand will likely keep growing much faster than this contract does.

Why it matters

The AI race is turning into an energy race. Models need chips, but chips need power, and power needs years of planning, permits and construction. A deal like this tells you that Google expects its data center growth to continue well into the 2040s, and that it is willing to sign two decade commitments to make sure it has the electricity.

It also shows how the politics of AI infrastructure are changing. A year or two ago, tech companies mainly competed for grid connections. Now grid operators like PJM push back and ask them to bring their own supply. Deals that add new capacity, such as uprates and restarts, are becoming the price of admission for building more AI data centers. Expect Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and OpenAI's partners to sign more of them.

For the rest of us, the effect is mixed. On the positive side, more firm, carbon free power on the grid helps everyone, and the companies promise that households will not pay for the upgrades. On the other side, three quarters of this deal is existing power that now has a very large and very wealthy long term buyer, in a grid that is already tight.

Dany's take

I like this deal more than the usual "AI needs a new nuclear reactor" headlines. Uprates are boring engineering, and boring engineering is what actually gets electricity onto the grid. Getting the equivalent of a large reactor out of plants that already exist, by 2032, is a far more realistic plan than waiting for the first wave of small modular reactors.

At the same time, I would not call it a 3.6 gigawatt nuclear deal. The new part is 890 megawatts. The rest is a long supply contract that mostly secures power for Google. That is fine, but it is a reminder of how much electricity AI already pulls from the system. When one company signs up for 3.6 gigawatts in a single region, the question of who gets power first becomes very real.

The detail I will watch is the Gemini agents inside the plants. If AI really speeds up permitting and outage planning for nuclear uprates, that could be one of the most useful things these tools do this decade. If it stays a marketing add on, we will see it in the timeline.

Sources

• Constellation: Google and Constellation Announce Landmark Agreement to Bring 890 MW of New Nuclear Capacity to PJM Grid (6 October 2026)
• Google: Why we're backing America's existing nuclear plants (6 October 2026)
• CNBC: Google enters massive 3.6 GW power deal with Constellation Energy (6 October 2026)