Constellation Energy (CEG) stock soared 7% in early trading Tuesday after the nuclear power company announced that it had signed a 20-year agreement with Meta (META) as the social media giant’s energy demands soar due to its AI data center expansion.
Shares of Constellation Energy were already up 27% for the month after the company said in its first quarter earnings report in early May that it was making “tremendous progress” on new power agreements. The Trump administration passed executive orders aiming to expand US nuclear energy capacity later that month.
Constellation said its 20-year deal with Meta would support the expansion of its Clinton nuclear facility in Illinois, increasing its energy output by 30 megawatts, and “preserve 1,100 high-paying local jobs.” The companies didn’t put a dollar figure on the deal.
Meta said in its own announcement that the agreement will begin in 2027 and “support Meta’s operations in the region,” specifically its AI data centers. Meta opened a data center in Dekalb, Ill., in 2023.
Shares of the Facebook parent traded flat on Tuesday.
“Securing clean, reliable energy is necessary to continue advancing our AI ambitions,” Meta head of global energy Urvi Parekh said in a press release.
Meta is set to spend as much as $72 billion in 2025 as the tech company expands its data center footprint to support its AI ambitions. Overall, Big Tech is moving fast to make clean energy deals, specifically for nuclear energy.
Microsoft (MSFT) announced a power agreement with Constellation Energy in September 2024 to reopen Three Mile Island to support its AI efforts. The deal would provide Constellation with about $785 million in annual revenue by 2030, Bloomberg reported. The news sent the nuclear power stock up 22% on the day of the news.
Meanwhile, Amazon (AMZN) bought a data center campus from nuclear power company Talen Energy for $650 million last year, and Oracle (ORCL) is designing a data center powered by small nuclear reactors.
The deals come as companies’ massive investments in AI infrastructure have tested their clean energy ambitions. Power-hungry data centers have strained local power grids and deepened the companies’ carbon footprints.
Bank of America’s Vivek Arya wrote in a note to clients last week that power remains a constraint on Big Tech’s AI expansion.
“[D]eployment of data centers with reliable access to high power is as much of a bottleneck in AI deployments as access to chips and systems,” he said in a May 29 note.