For months, announcements about potential deals for energy providers to power the tech industry's AI data centers have sent stocks of the energy companies soaring. But a major announcement on Wednesday that's backed by the government barely registered at all for the power company involved -- a sign that investors aren't buying the AI power trade like they used to.
The Trump administration chose Florida-based utility NextEra Energy to be the power provider for a $100 billion data center project on a former uranium enrichment site in Paducah, Ky. NextEra stock was actually down on Wednesday, dropping 0.9%.
It's the latest sign that investors are no longer wowed by big data center announcements, particularly if they're short on details and confirmed customers.
NextEra is expected to build natural gas plants with two gigawatts of capacity and battery storage with 2.6 gigawatts of capacity for the Kentucky site -- more generation than the Hoover Dam. It's expected to power a data center campus with 1.2 gigawatts of computing capacity, which would make it among the largest in the country. Any extra power would be available to the local grid.
Brookfield Asset Management, which funds all sorts of power and tech infrastructure, is expected to finance the data center portion. Of the project's $100 billion estimated price tag, the energy assets are expected to cost $7 billion to $9 billion, according to NextEra.
Brookfield is set to spend around $20 billion for the data center. And the rest is likely to go into equipment like chips, funded by Brookfield or whichever company ends up leasing the data centers. Brookfield is in talks with tech companies, but hasn't yet nailed down a deal.
NextEra is involved in other major natural gas power plant projects for data centers that are backed by the federal government in Texas and Pennsylvania. But investors are getting antsy to see those projects pay off. During the company's earnings call last week, CEO John Ketchum said those projects were progressing, but hadn't been finalized yet.
One NextEra shareholder thinks that the stock market is underplaying the value of this new Kentucky deal. "This is a really meaningful announcement, and one the market is choosing to ignore given the current risk-off move away from the data center trade," wrote William Page, portfolio manager at Essex Global Environmental Opportunities Strategy, in an email.
The fact that the project is on federal land means it won't face the same kind of community pushback as other data centers, he wrote. And the sheer size of the battery storage opportunity validates NextEra's push into batteries, Page says.
For now, the market doesn't seem convinced.
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