Alphabet just paid $4.75 billion for a power company. Not a tech company that happens to use power—an actual infrastructure firm that builds solar farms and data centers. The deal gives Google control over 10.8 gigawatts of generating capacity, enough to power 8 million homes. Tech giants spent 2024 locking down nuclear reactors, buying stakes in power plants, and signing multi-billion dollar energy deals because the AI boom hit a hard limit: there's not enough electricity. By December 2025, the federal government joined the race—the Department of Energy opened federal land at Oak Ridge for nuclear-powered AI data centers, while advanced nuclear startups raised over $500 million in a single week.
Alphabet just paid $4.75 billion for a power company. Not a tech company that happens to use power—an actual infrastructure firm that builds solar farms and data centers. The deal gives Google control over 10.8 gigawatts of generating capacity, enough to power 8 million homes. Tech giants spent 2024 locking down nuclear reactors, buying stakes in power plants, and signing multi-billion dollar energy deals because the AI boom hit a hard limit: there's not enough electricity. By December 2025, the federal government joined the race—the Department of Energy opened federal land at Oak Ridge for nuclear-powered AI data centers, while advanced nuclear startups raised over $500 million in a single week.
The utilities can't keep up. When 60 data centers in Virginia briefly went offline in 2024, they nearly crashed the entire grid. Dominion Energy started telling data center developers their power won't be ready until 2026. Gartner predicts 40% of AI data centers will face power shortages by 2027. So tech companies stopped waiting. Amazon bought a data center campus wired directly into a nuclear plant. Microsoft is restarting Three Mile Island. Google ordered a fleet of small modular reactors and expanded its partnership with NextEra Energy to develop 15 gigawatts of power by 2035. The message: if the grid can't deliver, we'll build our own—and now the government is helping.