NextEra Energy agreed to acquire Dominion Energy for $66.8 billion in cash and stock on May 18, creating the world's largest regulated utility with combined enterprise value exceeding $200 billion. The deal lands NextEra in Northern Virginia, where Dominion serves 70% of the nation's internet traffic through its transmission lines and holds contracts with every hyperscaler building out AI infrastructure between Ashburn and Manassas.
The transaction values Dominion at $55.60 per share, a 14% premium to its thirty-day average. NextEra will assume $45 billion in Dominion debt. Shareholders vote in Q4 2025, with closing expected in the first half of 2026 pending FERC and state regulatory clearance in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Utah. NextEra's regulated asset base expands from $75 billion to $135 billion overnight.
This is not a consolidation story. Northern Virginia's Loudoun County operates 17 million square feet of data-center space, with another 9 million under construction. Dominion serves this footprint through dedicated substations that tie directly into PJM Interconnection, the grid operator for thirteen states. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have all signed power-purchase agreements with Dominion in the past eighteen months. NextEra just bought the infrastructure layer beneath every training run and inference cluster those companies will deploy through 2030. The 18 gigawatts of generation capacity Dominion brings includes 6 gigawatts of nuclear baseload from its North Anna and Surry facilities, the only firm power source capable of meeting AI's 24/7 uptime requirements without fossil fuel exposure.
NextEra's existing renewables portfolio—30 gigawatts of wind and solar—pairs with Dominion's nuclear and gas generation to create the first vertically integrated platform capable of matching hyperscale power demand with supply at contracted rates. The company has already signaled it will dedicate $15 billion in capex over the next three years to transmission upgrades in Virginia, specifically targeting grid bottlenecks between generation sites and data-center clusters. The arithmetic is clean: Dominion's contracted load growth in Northern Virginia runs at 12% annually, triple the national average, and NextEra's renewable build-out costs have declined 22% since 2021.
Allocators should track three dates. First, Dominion's Q3 earnings in late October, which will detail contracted versus speculative load forecasts for 2026 and 2027. Second, the Virginia State Corporation Commission's preliminary ruling on the merger, expected in January 2026, which will set rate-base terms for the combined entity. Third, NextEra's investor day in March 2026, where management will outline data-center revenue as a standalone segment. The company has not historically broken out commercial versus residential earnings, but the size of this acquisition forces disclosure. Watch also for PJM's capacity auction results in July 2025, which will price firm power commitments for delivery in 2027 and reveal how much the market is willing to pay for baseload in AI-dense regions.
The deal closes before every hyperscaler's second wave of data-center construction begins, scheduled for late 2026. NextEra just became the only utility that can sign a power contract and guarantee delivery without waiting on new generation builds.