Europe may be about to learn what America already knows: when Big Tech goes shopping for electricity, prices go one way.
JP Morgan reckons the hunt for reliable power to run data centres could stoke European energy price inflation and speed up the long-promised nuclear renaissance.
Analyst Phil Buller, who covers European capital goods and utilities, thinks the market is underestimating the trend because it is complex and sprawls across several sectors.
Exhibit A is a 22-year power purchase agreement (PPA), essentially a long-term deal to buy electricity at a set price, signed this month by Google and Fortum, the Finnish energy group.
It will keep a nuclear plant in Finland running until 2050, with Google paying a premium of around 60% to forward power prices.
That is not a number to ignore, according to JP Morgan.
It also has a familiar ring to it. Two years ago, Microsoft agreed a 20-year deal with Constellation Energy, the US nuclear operator, at a similar premium to relaunch the roughly one gigawatt Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania.
At the time, it looked like a hyperscaler (one of the giant cloud computing providers) paying up for baseload power, the steady round-the-clock supply that wind and solar cannot guarantee.
With hindsight, Buller argues, it looks rather visionary, as Microsoft locked in supply before energy costs took off.
The American rush for data centre power is well underway. Europe's, JP Morgan suspects, has barely started.
