NextEra Energy completed its $67 billion all-cash acquisition of Dominion Energy on Tuesday, creating a utility with 46 gigawatts of generating capacity serving 14 million customers across 15 states. The close happened six months ahead of initial regulatory projections.

The combined entity now holds 22 gigawatts of renewable capacity—three times the nearest competitor—and direct transmission access to Virginia, the Carolinas, and Florida's interstate fiber corridors. Dominion's Virginia service territory alone hosts 70 percent of U.S. colocation capacity. NextEra inherits 18 operational nuclear reactors, 31 natural gas peaker facilities, and 9,400 miles of high-voltage transmission lines that connect directly to existing hyperscale campuses. The deal included $8.2 billion in Dominion debt, which NextEra refinanced at 4.1 percent through a syndicate led by Goldman Sachs and Barclays before the ink dried.

This matters because AI training clusters require 300 to 500 megawatts per facility—ten times the load of traditional enterprise data centers—and they need firm capacity commitments on 10-year horizons. Utilities without nuclear baseload or utility-scale solar cannot credibly bid. NextEra now controls the only vertically integrated stack—generation, transmission, retail—capable of offering sub-6-cent-per-kilowatt-hour power purchase agreements with 99.9 percent uptime SLAs in the Eastern Interconnection. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have each spent $14 billion-plus on data center construction in the past 18 months; none have locked equivalent long-term power at that price. The acquisition also removes Dominion as a competitor in the $22 billion queue of unfulfilled data center power requests across PJM Interconnection territory.

Operators should monitor three events. First, NextEra's Q2 earnings call in late April, where management will detail the $1.8 billion in cost synergies and announce the first tranche of data center PPAs—likely 2 to 4 gigawatts committed by mid-2025. Second, PJM's capacity auction results in June, which will price the scarcity premium NextEra now commands in the mid-Atlantic. Third, watch for regulatory filings in North Carolina and South Carolina by September, as NextEra will seek expedited approval for 12 gigawatts of solar-plus-storage projects that Dominion had shelved due to capital constraints. Those projects sit on entitled land adjacent to existing substations.

The deal closed on a Tuesday. By Thursday, NextEra's investor relations desk had fielded 140 inbound calls from allocators repositioning for the AI infrastructure build. The questions were not about renewables or rate base. They were about gigawatts, and how fast.