Google has entered into a 25-year power-purchase agreement with NextEra Energy to revive the Duane Arnold Energy Center, a 615-megawatt nuclear power plant in Iowa that was shut down in 2020. The plant is planned to restart operations in early 2029, and Google will buy the majority of its output to support its growing cloud and AI-data-centre infrastructure.
This move underscores how AI’s infrastructure demands—especially for energy-intensive data centres—are reshaping the energy landscape. NextEra expects global power demand to jump significantly in the coming decades, with around 17 % of that growth driven by AI-related data-centres.
From a strategic perspective, the partnership blends clean-energy goals with technological scaling: nuclear power offers carbon-free, reliable baseload electricity, which aligns with Google’s push for sustainability and high uptime in its data-centre operations. At the same time, it signals a revival of previously uneconomic nuclear plants, driven by new demand morphing around AI.
For India or other emerging markets, the takeaway is clear: as AI infrastructure scales up, so do the demands on power, grid reliability and low-carbon supply. It suggests that tech firms and infrastructure developers must anticipate and invest in the energy link-chain—not just compute and data-storage—if they want to build resilient and sustainable AI ecosystems.
