NextEra and Google ink a deal to restart Duane Arnold

A day anticipated by many across the nuclear community has finally arrived: NextEra Energy has officially announced its plans to restart Iowa's only nuclear power plant, the Duane Arnold Energy Center.

That restart, which is slated for completion by the first quarter of 2029, is being supported by a power purchase agreement (PPA) from Google, which in turn will use the power for its growing data center infrastructure in the state.

How we got here: Duane Arnold is a 621.9-MWe boiling water reactor located in Palo, a small town approximately eight miles northwest of Cedar Rapids. It entered commercial operation in February 1975. Licensed through 2034, NextEra made the decision to shutter the plant in October 2020. A few months before that target date, in August of that year, derechos (intense, fast-moving, straight-line windstorms) swept through the area, causing a loss of off-site power and damaged the plant's cooling towers.

Owing to this extensive damage, NextEra found it more economically feasible to close the plant a few months ahead of schedule than to pay for costly repairs. Decommissioning planning had already begun that June, with NextEra estimating the total cost at just over $1 billion.

A downward trend: Duane Arnold was part of a wave of single-unit nuclear power plant closures. In 2018, Oyster Creek closed; in 2019 Pilgrim and Three Mile Island-1 followed; 2020 saw the end of operations at Duane Arnold; and in 2022 Palisades generated its last electricity. Most of these plants cited economic hardship as one of the primary motivators for closure.

Five years after Duane Arnold's shutdown, the nuclear sector and the energy landscape at large were significantly different, and changes in the market began to make nuclear look more viable to investors. Exelon Generation began working to resurrect TMI-1, rechristening the Crane Clean Energy Center, and Holtec International began working to restart Palisades. In January 2025, NextEra filed a licensing change request for Duane Arnold with the NRC-a first step in a potential restart. Since then, the nuclear community has waited to see whether these plans would develop further as other restart projects continued to progress in the headlines. Most notably on that front, new fuel arrived at Palisades earlier this month, and the plant's restart is expected by the end of the year.

Duane Arnold's restart plan: While earlier communications from NextEra indicated a possible late 2028 restart, the company announced October 27 that those plans have been slightly delayed to early 2029. According to Reuters, NextEra has already ordered major equipment for the project, including a power generator and cooling towers.

NextEra also said that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire 100 percent ownership of the plant from its minority owners.

Google is providing funding for restart work at the plant through its entrance into a 25-year PPA.

The remaining power generated by the plant will be purchased by Central Iowa Power Cooperative-a nonprofit that serves 300,000 Iowans. NextEra did not detail how much power will go to Google and how much will go to CIPCO, but it did guarantee that "energy customers in Iowa will not bear any costs associated with the power Google purchases from the facility."

The deal is set to bring more than 800 "direct, indirect, and induced jobs during the plant's construction and approximately 400 direct, full-time jobs during operations," along with $340 million in annual economic output, according to NextEra..

Google, which will use the power purchased from Duane Arnold to support its AI and cloud infrastructure in the state, has already invested more than $6.8 billion in Iowa alone on data center development and recently announced an additional $7 billion data center investment to come in the next two years.

"Meeting the demands of emerging technologies requires reliable, clean energy, and the Duane Arnold nuclear facility is ideally positioned to deliver it," said Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who has been a strong advocate for new nuclear development in the state.

NextEra and Google also signed an agreement to explore the development of new nuclear generation nationwide, though details on what that collaboration will look like are yet to be revealed.

A note on Big Tech: Duane Arnold, once part of a string of closures, now joins a wave of potential restarts-but it also exemplifies the growing link between the nuclear sector and Big Tech. Some of the key partnerships in that space, which have broadly come in the form of PPAs to support data center developments, are recapped below:

• Meta, in June 2025, partnered with Constellation to purchase the entire energy output of Clinton Clean Energy Center in Illinois over the next 20 years. This agreement is set to help Constellation avoid the premature closure of the single-reactor, 1,121-MW plant and will also support a 30-MW uprate. Meta will use the power for AI goals and data center operations.
• Microsoft, in September 2024, partnered with Constellation through a 20-year PPA that will support the restart of the Crane Clean Energy Center. Constellation is aiming for a 2027 plant restart, and Microsoft plans to use the power for its data centers. In May 2023, Microsoft also entered into a PPA with fusion start-up Helion Energy.
• Amazon, in May 2024, bought a 960-MW data center campus from Talen Energy beside the 2.5-GW Susquehanna nuclear power plant, which directly powers the site. While that partnership has encountered continued difficulties with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, both companies expanded their PPA in June 2025. In October 2024, Amazon also partnered with Energy Northwest and X-energy to deploy SMRs in Washington and recently confirmed that the project is still on track.
• Aside from its Duane Arnold investment, Google entered into an agreement with Kairos Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority in August 2025. In June 2025, it also entered into a PPA with fusion start-up Commonwealth Fusion Systems-a company in which it has made significant capital investments.