Up until this week, NextEra Energy, the Florida-based power company that has just unveiled swashbuckling plans for one of the largest mergers in history, was best known as America’s clean-energy champion, more focused on renewables than transformative takeovers.
Now its planned $420bn combination with its rival Dominion Energy has set out in stark relief how much the AI revolution has affected not just once sleepy utilities but the whole phenomenon of mergers and acquisitions in the US.
The boom — and what it means for sectors such as power and memory chips, as well as its broader economic impact — has transformed the scale, structure and logic of dealmaking.