By Avi Salzman
Utility NextEra Energy announced major deals on Monday to supply power for Meta and Google data centers, largely with clean energy sources. The company increased its earnings guidance too, but Wall Street wasn't impressed.
NextEra's stock was down 2% in midday trading, while the S&P 500 fell 0.5%.
The announcements may have made a big splash, but the company's expected earnings and dividend growth were less exciting.
NextEra, a Florida-based company that's one of America's largest owners of clean energy projects like solar and wind farms, said it will sell Meta about 2.5 gigawatts of electricity from solar and battery-storage projects spread across the Midwest, Texas, and the Southwest. It is also building at least three gigawatt-scale data centers with Alphabet-owned Google. It's not yet clear what kind of energy generation sources they will use.
"We're still early in the development process for the new campuses and will share details when they are available," said Google representative Devon Smiley.
A gigawatt is roughly the capacity of a large nuclear reactor and can serve several hundred thousand homes. NextEra previously agreed to pursue a separate nuclear project with Google, which involves restarting a defunct reactor in Iowa.
That wasn't the only news that NextEra released on Monday. A subsidiary of the company also announced that it's buying Symmetry Energy Solutions, a privately held company that distributes natural gas. It did not release details on the size of the deal.
These shifts will affect earnings, but perhaps not as much as investors had hoped.
In a securities filing, NextEra said it is resetting its expectations for 2025 earnings per share to the high end of its prior guidance. It expects to earn $3.62 to $3.70 a share this year, up from a prior range of $3.45 to $3.70. But analysts tracked by FactSet had already been anticipating earnings of $3.68 a share.
Next year, the company sees EPS landing in a range of $3.92 to $4.02, which is also in line with analysts' expectations for $4. The company says it's targeting adjusted earnings growth of at least 8% a year through 2035.
Dividends are set to grow by 10% a year in 2025 and 2026, and then 6% in 2027 and 2028. NextEra's dividend yield is 2.8%, better than the average S&P 500 stock but worse than the average utility, which yields 3.1%.
Write to Avi Salzman at avi.salzman@barrons.com
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December 08, 2025 14:45 ET (19:45 GMT)
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