Solar Company Nextpower Hits All-Time High on AI Battery Deal
(Bloomberg) -- Nextpower Inc. shares briefly touched an all-time high after the solar tracking provider agreed to buy battery company Prevalon Energy for as much as $365 million, marking the solar-tracking provider’s move into energy storage and the fast-growing AI data-center market.
The deal for Prevalon, a joint venture of Mitsubishi Power Americas and EES, will be paid with a mix of cash and stock, Fremont, California-based Nextpower said Thursday in a statement.
“It’s not just bringing us into the battery-energy-storage business, this brings us into the data-center power-supply business,” Nextpower Chief Executive Officer Dan Shugar said of the transaction in an interview.
Nextpower stock climbed as much as 19% to touch $163.13, the highest since it began trading in February 2023.
“The acquisition moves Nextpower beyond solar trackers toward an integrated generate, store, control and operate platform, with AI data-center storage as the strategic prize,” KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst Sophie Karp wrote in a research note.
The purchase adds to a flurry of deals as power companies reposition themselves to meet a surge in electricity demand driven by artificial intelligence. Last week, NextEra Energy Inc. agreed to pay about $67 billion in stock for Dominion Energy Inc., the industry’s largest-ever acquisition. Overall, electricity demand from data centers will likely more than double over the next decade, according to BloombergNEF.
Nextpower said the purchase of Prevalon will allow it to raise its 2027 revenue guidance to a range of $4 billion to $4.4 billion from $3.8 billion to $4.1 billion. It also boosted its 2027 adjusted profit range to about $845 million to $930 million from $825 million to $900 million.
Nextpower has made a string of acquisitions to expand beyond solar trackers into clean-power system-development services, including electrical wiring and power conversion. The move into energy storage comes as data-center developers deploy batteries to bring facilities online faster and handle rapidly fluctuating power needs. The global battery market is forecast to grow to 10 times its 2025 size by the end of 2036, according to BNEF.
Prevalon has more than six gigawatt-hours of battery storage installed and 1.3 gigawatts of supply contracts for AI and data-center deployments, Shugar said. Nextpower plans to operate the business as a wholly owned subsidiary, he said.
“While Prevalon serves traditional utility-scale needs such as renewable-energy shifting, frequency regulation and grid stabilization, it is uniquely positioned to serve the AI and hyperscaler data-center market,” TD Cowen analyst Jeff Osborne said in a note.
(Updates with share move in the first paragraph, analyst quote in the fifth and last paragraphs.)
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