US loans NextEra $1.9B to revive Iowa nuclear plant behind Google's datacenter push

The U.S. Department of Energy has extended a $1.9 billion loan to NextEra Energy to refurbish the Duane Arnold Energy Center, an Iowa nuclear plant that has sat idle since 2020 and that Google expects to help power a cluster of new datacenters, TechCrunch reports. Google first announced its plan to bring the plant back in October 2025.

The second loan of its kind

According to TechCrunch, the financing is only the second time the DOE has directly backed a reactor restart. In 2025, the department lent $1 billion to Constellation Energy to revive a unit at Three Mile Island. Taken together, the two deals signal that the current administration views dormant nuclear plants as a meaningful part of the answer to surging electricity demand from AI datacenters.

Deputy Energy Secretary James Danly said the Iowa plant's restart, scheduled for 2029, will "drive down electricity costs," though TechCrunch notes he did not explain how that would happen.

What the money buys

Duane Arnold shut down in 2020 after an intense rainstorm damaged the facility. NextEra chose to mothball it rather than repair it, a decision made at a time when inexpensive natural gas had made nuclear generation difficult to justify economically.

The overhaul will add 14 megawatts of capacity, bringing the plant to 615 megawatts in total. NextEra CEO John Ketchum said during an earnings call last year that only 50 megawatts will be set aside for the local power cooperative — an allocation TechCrunch calculates would cover 18% of Iowa's demand growth since 2021, the year before ChatGPT arrived.

Google, for its part, is reportedly considering building as many as six datacenters near the plant.

A familiar pattern across hyperscalers

Shuttered reactors have become a preferred shortcut for tech companies that need large volumes of carbon-free power on a tight timeline. Microsoft signed an agreement with Constellation two years ago to restart a Three Mile Island reactor that last ran in 2019; it is due back online in 2028 with 835 megawatts of capacity.

In Illinois, Constellation's Clinton Clean Energy Center was facing closure before Meta agreed to buy all of the clean-energy attributes from the 1.1 gigawatt facility. The electrons themselves will flow to the local grid, while Meta uses the certificates to offset emissions produced elsewhere — including those from its Hyperion AI datacenter, which TechCrunch reports would need 10 natural gas plants to operate and, if completed, would consume more electricity than the entire state of South Dakota.

The cupboard is nearly bare

According to a UtilityDive report cited by TechCrunch, the three plants above represent the easiest restart opportunities in the United States, with perhaps one or two more candidates remaining. Those, including California's San Onofre, have been closed longer and would require considerably more work to bring back online.

Why it matters

A federal loan of this size shows how directly public finance is now underwriting the energy strategies of private cloud and AI companies. Restarting an existing reactor is faster than building new generation of almost any kind, which matters because TechCrunch reports new datacenters are expected to nearly triple the sector's electricity demand by 2035.

But the approach has a hard ceiling. Once the small inventory of mothballed plants is used up, further datacenter growth will have to be met with new construction, gas, or other sources. The Duane Arnold deal also illustrates the local trade-offs: just 50 of the plant's 615 megawatts are earmarked for the surrounding community, with the rest effectively serving hyperscale computing.