Households within PJM could face an additional $70 per month in electricity costs by 2028 if current trends continue, the Natural Resources Defense Council estimates.
The International Energy Agency expects global data centre electricity demand to more than double to around 945 terawatt-hours by 2030. Within PJM, data centre expansion has contributed to a more than 11-fold rise in capacity prices since 2024.
That is the backdrop for a pair of deals struck within days of one another. On September 30, Amazon and Constellation Energy announced a 20-year power purchase agreement for 690 megawatts from Calvert Cliffs in Maryland. The contract includes 190 megawatts of additional generating capacity expected between 2030 and 2032.
Amazon is committing more than $3 billion to upgrades at the plant. Calvert Cliffs has two reactors and is rated at 1,790 megawatts, with its units licensed to 2034 and 2036.
Joe Dominguez, Constellation's chairman, president and chief executive, said: “This agreement demonstrates how private investment can strengthen critical energy infrastructure. Amazon's commitment supports the long-term operation of Calvert Cliffs for generations to come.”
On October 6, Constellation and Google announced their own 20-year agreement, covering 890 megawatts of uprates across 11 reactors at six sites in Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Google is investing more than $4.3 billion in the work.
The sites are Braidwood, Byron, LaSalle and Quad Cities in Illinois; Limerick near Pottstown, Pennsylvania; and Salem in New Jersey. The programme will add 348 megawatts at Limerick and 97 megawatts at Salem.
Together, the Amazon and Google contracts underwrite about 1,080 megawatts of capacity that does not exist today and more than $7.3 billion of plant investment. The first new output is due in 2028. Neither agreement involves building a new nuclear reactor.
Constellation's shares rose almost 14 percent on the morning of the Google announcement. On October 27, 2026, the company also announced a conditional loan commitment of up to $5 billion from the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Dominance Financing to support the uprates.
The commercial urgency is clearest in PJM, the grid operator serving roughly 67 million people across 13 American states and Washington, DC. Its 2028/29 capacity auction cleared 6,831 megawatts short of its reliability requirement.
According to PJM's independent market monitor, data centre demand contributed approximately $29.4 billion in capacity costs across the four most recent auctions. In the latest auction, around $6.3 billion of those costs was attributed to data centre demand, including forecasts for facilities that have yet to be built.
Federal regulators rejected most of PJM's proposal to require large new electricity consumers to provide their own generation capacity in October 2026. Amazon and Google have instead contracted directly with a nuclear operator for upgrades to existing plants.
They are far from alone. Microsoft agreed to pay $16 billion to restart the functioning reactor at Constellation's Three Mile Island facility and buy its output for 20 years. The remaining undamaged reactor at Three Mile Island is being brought back into service under that 20-year arrangement.
The Department of Energy is providing up to $4.4 billion in loans to support the restart of three shuttered plants, aiming to restore about 2.25 gigawatts. Palisades in Michigan, closed in 2022, is contracted to be generating again by March 2027.
Google has also signed a separate 15-year agreement covering another 2,700 megawatts of existing PJM generation, bringing its broader nuclear and existing generation package to about 3.6 gigawatts. Meta signed a 20-year virtual power purchase agreement with Constellation for 1,121 megawatts and supported a 30-megawatt expansion at Clinton Clean Energy Center in Illinois.
Outside the nuclear deals, Qatar's sovereign fund has committed to a $20 billion joint venture with Brookfield for AI infrastructure. Its first phase is roughly 300 megawatts, with potential expansion to near 1.5 gigawatts.
The question facing the grid is increasingly practical: who will finance the power needed for facilities whose demand is still arriving? For now, the answer includes long contracts between technology companies and the owners of reactors already on the map.
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