Clearway Energy CEO Craig Cornelius said hyperscale data center demand is accelerating so quickly that it is reshaping the cadence and scale of power development, driving the company toward larger, more complex project modules and multi-technology campuses in what could amount to a transformation of how the independent producer conducts its business.

Speaking at a Jefferies Power and Clean-Energy Forum earlier this this week, Cornelius said the 1.2 GW renewables-and-storage portfolio Clearway signed with Google in late 2025 is “just the beginning,” as hyperscalers seek to secure vast quantities of clean and reliable power to support a surge in AI-driven computation.

“You’re going to continue to see large quantities of contracts getting signed front-of-the-meter,” he said, adding that the sheer volumes required by hyperscalers mean Clearway will need to announce “larger things on a more routine basis” because the company’s project modules are becoming fundamentally bigger to match the load.

Cornelius said Clearway is now developing “large campuses” that combine wind, solar, battery storage and gas-fired resources through “novel electrical interconnections,” specifically designed to support the power-quality and reliability specifications required by data centers. These integrated complexes, he said, are becoming a central part of the company’s long-term strategy as cloud and AI providers seek both carbon-free energy and firm capacity.

He offered a rule-of-thumb calculation that underscores the magnitude of what hyperscalers now require: a 1.5 GW block of IT load demands roughly 4 GW of total generation across renewables, batteries and gas when optimized for cost and reliability. Those ratios, he noted, represent project scales that were “unheard of” in the conventional corporate-procurement market that predated the AI era.

Cornelius said Clearway is effectively developing any project it can “permit and interconnect in the next three years” because hyperscale customers will need all available capacity. He said demand from cloud providers “radically exceeds a couple hundred gigawatts” over the next decade, a figure that surpasses historic US generation build cycles and is pushing developers to expand the scope, sophistication and geographic diversity of their pipelines.

Clearway, he added, is well-positioned in this environment because hyperscalers increasingly prefer to contract with “the most capable large enterprises” that can reliably deliver multi-GW projects on tight timelines. Many cloud providers, he said, have had disappointing experiences with smaller or less-capitalized developers unable to execute at scale. “We’re building specifically because of this compute load,” he said, noting that Clearway’s development posture from now through 2030 assumes data-center-driven growth as a core strategic pillar.

Cornelius said Clearway expects to make “larger” announcements more frequently and will drop completed components of its multi-resource campuses into Clearway Energy Inc. in phases as each module is built and contracted.