The Newest Buyer of Nuclear Power Isn’t a Tech Company

Constellation and Walmart said on June 23 they had signed a long-term agreement for roughly 176 megawatts of emissions-free electricity from Constellation’s Dresden Clean Energy Center in Illinois, structured as two 15-year terms beginning in 2029 and 2030. About 30 of those megawatts will come from uprates, efficiency upgrades that raise output from the plant’s existing reactors without new construction. Walmart will take energy, capacity, and the associated environmental attributes, and the new generation is sized to support the high-tech perishable distribution center the retailer is building in Belvidere, Illinois. The Wall Street Journal reported that the companies did not disclose financial terms.

The companies called it Walmart’s first nuclear power purchase agreement and among the first between a large U.S. retailer and a nuclear facility. For roughly two years, nearly every marquee nuclear power deal in the country has been struck by a technology company chasing power for artificial intelligence. The Energy Information Administration documented Constellation’s 20-year agreement to supply Microsoft data centers from Three Mile Island Unit 1, a reactor retired in 2019 that Constellation agreed to bring back into service. CNBC reported that Constellation signed a separate 20-year agreement in June 2025 to sell Meta the roughly 1.1 gigawatts its Clinton plant in Illinois produces, that Amazon has tied data center capacity to the Susquehanna nuclear plant, and that Google has pledged to fund three new nuclear sites and partnered with a company that builds small modular reactors. What distinguishes the Walmart agreement is its buyer, one of the first retailers in a field so far defined by data center operators.

It enters on different terms. At 176 megawatts, the Walmart deal is far smaller than the gigawatt-scale commitments the technology buyers have made. Meta’s Clinton contract alone is roughly six times the size of Walmart’s. Its structure is also more conservative. Where Microsoft underwrote a reactor restart and Meta’s deal, as CNBC reported, kept the Clinton plant from an early retirement, Walmart is buying an offtake from a plant already in operation and helping fund added capacity through the uprates. Constellation, which Bloomberg describes as the largest supplier of nuclear power in the United States, holds a generation footprint that powers more than eight million homes. Dresden itself is licensed to operate through 2049 and 2051, following a renewal the company announced in December 2025, so the supply Walmart contracted does not hinge on reviving anything.

The more telling detail is what the power is for. Those technology deals exist to feed data centers, where AI training and inference pull enormous and constant electrical loads. The Walmart deal exists to feed a refrigerated, high-tech distribution center. Facilities of that kind typically run industrial refrigeration, automated storage and retrieval systems, and robotics on a continuous cycle, which points to a load profile closer to a small factory than to a store, and one that steady baseload generation suits better than intermittent wind or solar. Walmart has invested in energy solutions before, as the company noted in announcing the deal, but the Constellation agreement is its first nuclear contract and its first for baseload supply.

What the agreement marks, then, is less a one-off than a widening. The corporate appetite for baseload clean power, the kind that runs around the clock, is growing, as Reuters noted in its account of the deal. So far that appetite has concentrated among technology companies with the AI ambitions to match, from the Microsoft restart the Energy Information Administration documented to Meta’s deal for the Clinton plant, which CNBC reported in 2025. Walmart’s terms do not begin until 2029 and 2030, so the retailer is contracting for firm clean power well before it draws on it, with the Belvidere facility still in development. The two 15-year terms carry the commitment into the mid-2040s, against a plant licensed to run past 2050, the same multi-decade footing the data center operators chose when they began buying reactor output.

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