Electric power transmission pylon miniatures and Nextera Energy logo are seen in this illustration taken, December 9, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
People walk next to the Google Cloud logo, during the 2025 Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, March 4, 2025. REUTERS/Albert Gea

Dec 8 (Reuters) - NextEra Energy expanded its partnership with Alphabet's Google Cloud to scale up data center capacity, while securing over 2.5 gigawatts of clean energy contracts from Meta across the U.S., the company said on Monday.

Shares of NextEra were up 2.7% in premarket trading.

Under the expanded deal with Google Cloud, the companies will develop multiple new gigawatt-scale (GW) data centre campuses, each with accompanying generation and capacity.

NextEra and Google Cloud plan to launch an AI-powered product by mid-2026 to predict equipment issues, optimize crew scheduling and boost grid reliability amid storms, aging assets, and rising demand.

The deal comes as U.S. electricity demand grows due to rapid AI adoption, prompting cloud companies and utilities to secure land, grid connections and new generation to support large data center loads.

In October, the company had partnered with Google to restart an Iowa nuclear power plant shut down five years ago.

The technology industry's quest for massive amounts of electricity for AI processing has renewed interest in the country's nuclear reactors.

NextEra said it had signed 11 power purchase agreements and two energy storage agreements with Meta, totaling over 2.5 GW of clean energy contracts. The projects are scheduled to come online between 2026 and 2028.

The utility also reached an agreement with WPPI Energy to continue supplying 168 megawatts of the output from the Point Beach Nuclear Plant in Two Rivers into the 2050s.

(Reporting by Vallari Srivastava and Sumit Saha in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid and Shinjini Ganguli)