The US power producer NextEra Energy has partnered with oil and gas major ExxonMobil to build a 1.2 GW gas-fired power plant to serve the US data center sector (NextEra Energy, 2025 Investor Conference, 08/12/2025). The power plant will be integrated with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology, with the initial site located near Exxon’s CO₂ pipeline infrastructure in the south-east of the United States, according to NextEra. Reports indicate that the partners plan to market the site to a hyperscale data center developer in the first quarter of 2026.
In addition, NextEra has signed an MoU with Basin Electric Power Cooperative to explore the joint development of a 1.5 GW combined-cycle natural gas facility to power a data center campus in North Dakota (United States).
These announcements follow a major partnership between NextEra and Google, signed earlier in December 2025, which will see the companies develop several gigawatt-scale data center campuses along with the associated generation capacity needed to power them. Th two companies will also explore the development of advanced nuclear generation across the US. The initiatives are part of NextEra’s broader strategy to support data center growth across the US, relying increasingly on natural gas. The company plans to build 15 GW of capacity for data center hubs by 2035.
Specifically, NextEra plans to bring up to 8 GW of gas generation online by 2032 and is developing a pipeline of 20 GW of gas-fired projects. ExxonMobil announced in 2024 that it is developing natural gas solutions for data centers.
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