After Meta, Google (GOOGL.US) is tied to nuclear power: funding the expansion of two nuclear power plants by approximately 96 MW

According to Zhitong Finance APP, Alphabet (GOOGL.US) has agreed to invest in increasing the power generation capacity of two nuclear power plants operated by a subsidiary of Southern Company (SO.US), adding approximately 96 megawatts of power supply at a time when demand from data centers is driving up electricity needs. According to a statement released on Monday, Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet, will provide financing for the so-called “uprate” of the Vogtle and Hatch nuclear power plants in Georgia through a new rate arrangement. An uprate is a process that expands the reactor's power output by replacing some mechanical components and other methods.

Georgia Power, a Southern Company subsidiary, co-owns both the Vogtle and Hatch facilities, which are operated by Southern Nuclear under the parent company. This arrangement still requires regulatory approval.

This deal comes amid growing questions about who should pay for new power infrastructure to meet surging electricity demand. Georgia Power stated that its agreement with Google will help protect residential and other industrial users from having to bear the costs of these upgrades.

Similar arrangements have a precedent: last year, Constellation Energy agreed to sell power from its Illinois nuclear plant to Meta Platforms and also invested in improving that facility’s infrastructure. Nuclear power has emerged as one of the biggest winners from AI-driven surges in electricity demand because it can provide round-the-clock, carbon-free electricity. Upgrading existing plants often takes far less time than the multi-year process of building new ones from scratch.

Background: Tech Giants Racing for Nuclear Power

This “uprate” investment marks another step in Google’s nuclear strategy. In October 2024, Google signed an agreement with Kairos Power—the first-ever corporate contract involving the purchase of electricity from multiple Small Modular Reactors (SMRs)—planning to add up to 500 megawatts of advanced nuclear capacity by 2035. The first reactor, Hermes 2 (Oak Ridge, Tennessee), is slated to come online in 2030, with its electricity distributed through the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) grid to power Google’s data centers in Tennessee and Alabama.

Industry giants moved even earlier: In September 2024, Microsoft signed a 20-year, 835-megawatt power purchase agreement with Constellation Energy, driving the restart of Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island Unit 1 (Crane Clean Energy Center). In June 2025, Meta and Constellation Energy signed a 20-year power purchase agreement for the Clinton Clean Energy Center, securing 1,121 megawatts of carbon-free power to be delivered starting June 2027, including a 30-megawatt output increase via an uprate—this Clinton plant is the “Illinois nuclear plant” mentioned previously. The “uprate” approach has even appeared in new projects: Kairos later increased Hermes 2’s single-reactor output from 28 megawatts to 50 megawatts.

The gap on the demand side is clear: According to previous estimates by Goldman Sachs, U.S. data center electricity consumption will roughly triple between 2023 and 2030, requiring about 47 more gigawatts of installed capacity. Power shortages have already led to rising prices: capacity auction prices in many U.S. power markets have set repeated records in recent years, while long-term power purchase agreements with tech giants are providing new earning models for operating nuclear units.

Uprates are considered a fast track because they avoid the long timeline for new builds: Typically, simply replacing turbine blades, upgrading generator components, or instrument control systems allows operating units to squeeze out a few additional percentage points of output. Costs and construction time are measured in “years” and “hundreds of millions” rather than the “decades” and “tens of billions” required for new builds (according to common industry practice). The 96 megawatt scale is not large for Vogtle units, whose single-unit capacity is over a thousand megawatts, but it is extremely valuable during grid shortages—by rough U.S. household averages, that’s enough to supply tens of thousands of homes.

The Vogtle nuclear plant in Georgia itself is a symbol of U.S. nuclear revival: Units 3 and 4 started commercial operation in July 2023 and April 2024, respectively, marking the first new nuclear units built in the United States in decades, with a final cost exceeding $30 billion and severe project overruns. This history also explains why the “uprate” fast track is so attractive to tech companies—there’s no need to wait ten years, just upgrade existing units in operation.

Georgia is the front line of this electricity arms race: the Atlanta metro area has recently become one of the fastest-growing data center markets in the U.S., and Georgia Power has previously disclosed that pending large-load customer applications total several gigawatts. In early 2025, state regulators have already begun revising rate rules for large-load customers, requiring tech and industrial users to bear more infrastructure costs. The new rate arrangement with Google can be seen as a continuation of this regulatory direction.

The logic behind the nuclear power race is not complex: while wind and solar can be connected to the grid quickly, their intermittent nature is a limitation; nuclear’s 24/7 baseload perfectly matches the always-on load curve of data centers—explaining why tech giants have significantly shifted their clean energy procurement toward nuclear power in recent years.

The debate over who pays is also playing out in Georgia: Georgia Power has expanded its electricity investments in recent years in response to increased data center demand, with ongoing regulatory debates balancing rising residential tariffs and “large user self-paid costs”. Whether the new rate arrangement in this agreement will be approved is the latest test of this debate—if approved, it will cement the “large user pays” principle within the rate structure in the form of “uprate financing.” The statement did not disclose what Google is paying, nor did it specify the terms under which Google will obtain the additional power.