A major U.S. cloud and artificial intelligence operator on Monday signed an 11-gigawatt nuclear power purchase agreement spanning four utilities and 18 reactor units, the largest single corporate nuclear commitment on record and the most explicit sign yet that the energy debate that drove this spring’s moratorium fight has begun to reshape how hyperscalers procure electricity.

The 25-year contract, announced jointly by the company and the four utility counterparties in Washington and at a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission policy forum in Bethesda, covers existing pressurized-water reactors in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and South Carolina, along with three small modular reactor sites that the utilities expect to bring online between 2029 and 2032. Officials briefed on the structure said it carries an estimated lifetime contract value of more than $120 billion, with prepayments and capacity-reservation fees that begin flowing this year.

The agreement is the largest in a wave of nuclear procurement that has accelerated since the House Ways and Means Committee killed the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez training moratorium on April 22. With state-level moratorium bills now advancing in California, New York and Oregon and with grid operators in PJM and ERCOT warning of multi-year interconnection backlogs, hyperscaler chief executives have shifted to long-duration firm-power contracts as both a hedge and a political signal.

“The moratorium fight was, at its core, a fight about electrons,” said Dr. Naomi Strand, director of the Energy Futures Initiative at the Brookings Institution. “The industry lost the argument on transparency and won on the bill. They cannot afford to lose the argument on the grid. An 11-gigawatt nuclear contract is a way of saying, in language that legislators in Sacramento and Albany understand, that we are not going to drive your retail electricity bills up by buying every megawatt of natural gas on the spot market.”

The hyperscaler’s chief sustainability officer, speaking at the Bethesda forum, said the contract was designed to “match every megawatt-hour of new training-cluster load with firm, zero-carbon generation on the same regional interconnection.” That framing — sometimes called 24/7 carbon-free matching — has become the de facto standard in voluntary disclosure regimes following last week’s bipartisan Senate compromise on AI energy reporting, which would require operators of clusters above 100 megawatts to publish hourly load-versus-generation matching beginning in 2027.

Two of the four utility counterparties said the contract had been structured around existing reactors whose merchant-market revenues had been squeezed by competition from subsidized renewables and cheap natural gas. The agreement effectively converts those plants into long-duration baseload assets dedicated to a single industrial offtaker, a structure regulators in Harrisburg and Springfield indicated they would scrutinize for impacts on residential and commercial ratepayers.

“We will not approve a contract that lifts grandma’s bill so that a data center in suburban Columbus can train a model,” said Patricia Olufemi, chair of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, in a brief interview after the announcement. “The submissions we have seen so far show no retail rate impact and, in fact, some downward pressure from the prepayment structure. But we are going to test those assumptions.”

Olufemi said the Ohio commission expected to open a public review proceeding within two weeks. Commissioners in the other three states made similar commitments through staff statements.

The deal’s three small modular reactor sites — two in southwestern Pennsylvania and one near Aiken, South Carolina — have not yet received NRC construction permits. A spokesperson for the commission said its decisions were made on technical safety grounds and were “not influenced by commercial commitments.” Industry analysts nonetheless said the contracts would likely accelerate financing close for several pending SMR projects.

“The single biggest barrier to SMR deployment in the United States has been the absence of a creditworthy, long-duration offtaker,” said John Reilly, an analyst at Citi who covers power and renewables. “A 25-year contract from a triple-A-rated counterparty, with prepayments structured to support construction debt, fundamentally changes the financing math. We expect at least two and possibly four other hyperscaler nuclear announcements before the end of the third quarter.”

The political reaction split predictably. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who co-sponsored the failed moratorium bill, called the announcement “a step in the right direction” but said the industry’s underlying load growth still warranted federal scrutiny. “Eleven gigawatts is a real commitment,” Sanders said. “It is also five percent of what these companies are planning to build.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez welcomed the firm-power commitment but reiterated her concern about water use, transmission build-out and the concentration of compute resources in a handful of firms. Republican leaders on the House Energy and Commerce Committee praised the deal more straightforwardly, with Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers saying it showed “what is possible when the federal government gets out of the way of American industry and American nuclear.”

Inside the hyperscaler, executives described the contract as the product of nine months of negotiations that began before the moratorium bill was introduced. A senior vice president for energy procurement, speaking on condition of anonymity because the executive was not authorized to discuss internal deliberations, said the company had concluded by late summer 2025 that its renewable-plus-storage strategy could not keep pace with its training-load growth on the timelines its product roadmap demanded.

“We had a choice,” the executive said. “We could quietly buy a lot of gas, hope nobody noticed, and take the political risk. Or we could buy nuclear, pay a premium, and tell that story honestly. The board concluded last fall that the second path was the only one that survives contact with this Congress and this electorate.”

The announcement landed in a tech sector still working through the policy aftermath of the moratorium fight. Shares in three of the four largest U.S. AI operators rose between 0.6 and 1.4 percent in afternoon trading. Constellation Energy, the largest of the utility counterparties, climbed 4.3 percent. Cameco, the uranium producer, rose 2.7 percent. The S&P 500 closed up 0.4 percent.

Officials at the company and at the four utilities said additional procurement announcements, including a separate long-duration geothermal pilot and a transmission cost-sharing agreement with a Midwestern grid operator, would be unveiled in the coming weeks.