NextEra Energy agreed May 18 to acquire Dominion Energy for $66.8 billion in equity value, consolidating 18 gigawatts of generation capacity across Florida, Virginia, and the Carolinas. The transaction creates the largest regulated utility footprint directly serving Northern Virginia's 70% share of global hyperscale colocation capacity. Dominion's service territory includes Loudoun County, where 400MW of new data center interconnection requests filed in Q1 2025 alone.

The deal represents a 37% premium to Dominion's April 30 close and values the combined regulated asset base at $142 billion. NextEra assumes $38 billion in Dominion debt. The structure is all-stock, with Dominion shareholders receiving 0.9 NextEra shares per Dominion common, closing expected Q4 2025 subject to FERC and state utility commission approvals across six jurisdictions. Virginia's State Corporation Commission historically requires 14-18 months for major utility merger review.

The intelligence here is infrastructure allocation, not kilowatt-hours. Dominion filed 22 new generation interconnection applications in Virginia during 2024, 19 of which specify data center load as the offtaker. NextEra's investor presentation disclosed $14 billion in planned capital expenditure through 2028, with $9.2 billion earmarked for transmission upgrades and substation builds in Virginia and the Carolinas. The company's Florida generation assets—24GW of natural gas and solar—will backstop reliability, but the growth thesis is contracted hyperscale power in markets where 15-year utility supply agreements are standard. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google collectively hold 4.2GW of reserved capacity in Dominion's current queue, all pre-negotiated at avoided-cost rates before this transaction.

What gets starved: retail electrification. Dominion operated 312 public EV charging stations across its Mid-Atlantic footprint as of year-end 2024. NextEra's management commentary on the May 19 analyst call mentioned data center load 18 times and transportation electrification zero times. The company's regulatory filings in Florida show $47 million allocated to EV infrastructure in 2024 versus $1.8 billion for grid-scale renewables tied to commercial offtake agreements. The combined entity will serve 12 million retail electricity customers, but capital deployment tilts heavily toward the 300-500MW hyperscale contracts that lock in regulated returns for two decades.

Allocators should track three near-term events. First, Virginia SCC docket filings due July 15, 2025, will disclose NextEra's proposed rate base treatment for Dominion's existing $6.3 billion in deferred generation costs. Second, FERC's market power analysis, typically released 90-120 days post-filing, will clarify whether NextEra must divest any of Dominion's 4.8GW of merchant generation in PJM. Third, Amazon's 2.3GW Northern Virginia data center expansion, announced March 2025 with a 2027 target energization date, requires 1,400MW of new transmission capacity that NextEra now controls the build schedule for.

NextEra's short interest dropped 340 basis points to 1.8% of float in the week following announcement. The company's equity trades at 19.2x forward regulated earnings versus the utility sector median of 16.4x, pricing in the scarcity value of the only top-three U.S. utility with direct exposure to Northern Virginia's $85 billion annual hyperscale capital deployment. Dominion's former EV charging division will be absorbed into NextEra's unregulated subsidiary, where it will compete for capital against solar development projects with 18-22% unlevered IRRs backed by investment-grade counterparties.