NextEra to Buy Dominion for $67B in an All-Stock Deal Built for the AI Power Era

On May 18, NextEra Energy agreed to acquire Dominion Energy in an all-stock transaction valued at roughly $67 billion, a combination that would create the largest regulated electric utility in the world. Under the terms, Dominion shareholders receive 0.8138 NextEra shares for each Dominion share — a tax-free exchange — plus a separate one-time cash payment of about $360 million in aggregate at closing. NextEra holders would own roughly 74.5% of the combined company and Dominion holders about 25.5%, in a business carrying an enterprise value near $420 billion.

The logic of the deal is almost entirely about electricity, and electricity is increasingly about artificial intelligence. The two companies project that U.S. power demand will rise about 60% between 2025 and 2045 — roughly six times faster than over the prior two decades — as AI data centers, electrified industry and transport pull on the grid. The scale of individual projects has exploded along with it: where a typical generation project once meant 200 megawatts and about half a billion dollars, today's data-center hubs approach 5,000 megawatts and capital costs near $15 billion. The merged company says it is chasing a large-load customer pipeline exceeding 130 gigawatts, with at least 10 gigawatts of that representing incremental data-center demand.

The combined utility would serve roughly 10 million customer accounts across Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina — a footprint that happens to include the densest concentration of data centers on the planet in Dominion's Northern Virginia territory. It would own about 110 gigawatts of generation today across renewables, natural gas, nuclear and storage, with management mapping a path toward 225 to 260 gigawatts by 2032, and it would be more than 80% regulated. John Ketchum, NextEra's chairman and chief executive, would lead the combined company, with Dominion chief Robert Blue becoming president of regulated utilities and joining the board. "Scale matters more than ever, not for the sake of size, but because scale translates into capital and operating efficiencies," Ketchum said.

To smooth the regulatory path, NextEra is dangling $2.25 billion in customer bill credits spread over two years after the deal closes, weighted heavily toward Virginia (about 79%), with the remainder to South Carolina and North Carolina. Management is selling the financials hard to investors as well: the deal is pitched as immediately accretive to adjusted earnings per share, supporting a 9%-plus EPS growth rate into the 2030s and roughly 6% annual dividend growth through 2028. Even so, NextEra's stock slipped on the announcement, reflecting both the size of the bet and the long road ahead.

That road is the catch. The transaction needs antitrust (HSR) clearance, FERC approval under Section 203, Nuclear Regulatory Commission sign-off and state-level reviews in Virginia and the Carolinas, with a Form S-4 planned for the third quarter of 2026 and shareholder votes expected in early 2027. The companies are targeting a close in the fourth quarter of 2027 — 12 to 18 months out — which leaves plenty of time for regulators or rivals to complicate it. But the strategic message is hard to miss: in the AI era, the scarce resource is no longer just chips, it is power, and the utilities that control generation and interconnection are now infrastructure plays on the AI boom itself.