NextEra eyes $400B buyout of major utility stock

The biggest deal in utility history landed today, Monday, May 18.

Financial Times and Bloomberg both reported over the May 15-16 weekend that NextEra Energy (NEE) is in advanced talks to acquire Dominion Energy (D) in a mostly stock-based deal worth roughly $400 billion in equity, with an enterprise value near $419 billion.

The two sides confirmed the all-stock deal on Monday. Dominion Energy investors will receive a fixed exchange ratio of 0.8138 shares of NextEra Energy for each share of Dominion Energy they own.

If it closes, this would be one of the largest corporate mergers ever attempted, and easily the biggest the U.S. power sector has ever seen.

For investors, the real story sits underneath the headline number. This deal is the moment AI's power crunch finally shows up at megacap M&A scale.

What NextEra would actually be buying with Dominion Energy

NextEra is the country's largest utility by market cap, anchored by Florida Power & Light and a massive renewables arm. Dominion serves around 3.6 million electric customers across Virginia and the Carolinas.

The reason this combination matters is geography.

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Dominion's Virginia footprint includes Northern Virginia's Data Center Alley, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). It also includes the largest concentration of hyperscale data centers in the world and direct access to PJM Interconnection, the grid covering 13 states and Washington, D.C.

Dominion had roughly 51 gigawatts of contracted data-center capacity as of March 2026, up from 16.5 GW in mid-2023, Investing.com noted. A regulatory filing from the company shows another 70,000 megawatts in the request pipeline.

That is the prize. NextEra wants direct ownership of where the power has to land.

The AI power math driving the NextEra-Dominion deal

Power, not chips, is now the constraint on AI buildout.

PJM's first-quarter 2026 wholesale power cost averaged $136.53 per megawatt-hour, up 75.5% from a year earlier, according to Monitoring Analytics, the grid's independent market monitor.

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Capacity prices, which compensate generators for being available, climbed from $28.92/MW-day for 2024-2025 to $329.17/MW-day for 2026-2027, the FERC-approved cap, Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis reported.

PJM's 2025 forecast projects 32 gigawatts of peak load growth between 2024 and 2030, Powwr wrote, with data centers responsible for 94% of it.