LevelTen Energy’s Q2 2026 PPA price index, published this morning, puts US hyperscaler-counterparty corporate procurement at 9.4 GW of newly contracted firm and renewable capacity signed across April, May, and June. That is up from 7.1 GW in Q1 and a record quarter on LevelTen’s series back to 2021.
The mix is what matters. Nuclear PPAs (operating-asset offtake, restart offtake, and new-build framework agreements combined) account for 3.9 GW of the quarter, or roughly 42 percent. That is the first quarter on record where nuclear has cleared 40 percent of the hyperscaler PPA pool. The previous high was Q4 2025 at 31 percent, anchored by the Microsoft Three Mile Island restart and the Meta Constellation life-extension package.
Inside the 3.9 GW nuclear figure, three signings drove the quarter:
- Alphabet’s 1.4 GW expanded Kairos/TVA framework, adding two 350 MW Hermes-2 follow-on units to the existing Oak Ridge anchor (announced April 22).
- A 1.1 GW Amazon Web Services framework extension with Energy Northwest, lifting the X-energy Xe-100 site-license target at the Columbia Generating Station from 4 to 5 reactor units (announced May 18).
- Meta’s 1.0 GW Pacific Gas and Electric Diablo Canyon Unit 1 and 2 long-term offtake covering the proposed 20-year operating-license extension (announced June 9).
The other 5.5 GW of the quarter splits across solar plus storage (3.2 GW), standalone storage (1.4 GW), and geothermal plus enhanced geothermal (0.9 GW, the highest quarterly EGS share on the LevelTen series).
The structural read sharpens the gap thesis Carnegie laid out on June 2. Announcement velocity is accelerating, with Q2 running 32 percent above Q1 on signed volume. But the contracted MWh remains backloaded. LevelTen’s tracker shows weighted-average commercial-operation date for Q2 nuclear PPAs at 2031, versus 2027 for solar plus storage and 2028 for standalone storage. The MWh that actually shows up on the grid in the load year matters more than the MW signed in the contract year, and the gap between those two numbers is widening, not narrowing.
The 42 percent nuclear share also reframes the supply-chain question for SMR vendors. X-energy, Kairos, and TerraPower now collectively anchor more contracted MW than any single hyperscaler’s renewable portfolio. The execution risk that used to sit at the vendor level has moved to the customer level. A 12-month slip at X-energy now drags Amazon’s stated 2030 firm-capacity coverage by a measurable percentage, not just a footnote.
The pricing signal in the LevelTen data is also worth flagging. Hyperscaler nuclear PPAs in Q2 cleared at a weighted-average $98 per MWh for 20-year terms, against $42 per MWh for solar-plus-storage and $61 per MWh for standalone storage. The nuclear premium has widened from $48 per MWh in Q1 2025 to $56 per MWh in Q2 2026, reflecting both lender-required risk premia on first-of-a-kind SMR risk and the willingness of hyperscaler counterparties to pay for firm round-the-clock power that does not require carbon offsets.
The next data point on the timing question is the NRC’s first combined license application under the new mandatory-hearing sequence (the Holtec SMR-300 limited work authorization at Palisades, covered separately in today’s permitting note). The Q2 PPA volume locks in the demand-side commitment. The permitting throughput locks in the supply-side timeline. Both have to clear for the contracted MWh to actually show up.