The Trump administration is offering as much as $5 billion in financing to Constellation Energy Corp. to upgrade and modernize the nuclear operator’s fleet of reactors in Illinois, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.

The projects backed by the conditional loan commitment are expected to add nearly 1.1 gigawatts of electricity and help strengthen the grid and lower costs, according to the Energy Department. Constellation shares surged on the news.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced the funding Tuesday at an Illinois nuclear plant that will supply power to Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

“We said we were going to launch a nuclear renaissance and I can assure you we are all in on doing that,” Wright said standing in the shadow of one of the plant’s massive cooling towers.

Technology companies are driving interest in nuclear projects to power artificial intelligence. But new reactors can take a decade or more to permit and build. Upgrading components such as turbines can increase the output from existing plants, and is seen as a faster and cheaper way to deliver carbon-free fission electricity.

Constellation shares gained 2.6% on Tuesday.

The Energy Department financing is part of President Donald Trump’s push to expand nuclear power to meet growing electricity demand from data centers and support domestic manufacturing. The funding follows an executive order that set a goal of adding 5 gigawatts of capacity through upgrades at existing nuclear plants, 96% of which has been achieved, the department said.

Constellation is planning investments at six Illinois plants — Braidwood, Byron, Clinton, Dresden, LaSalle and Quad Cities — as well as Calvert Cliffs in Maryland and Limerick in Pennsylvania to increase output from existing nuclear plants, the Energy Department said. The financing, through the department’s Office of Energy Dominance Financing, also includes an option to fund future uprates at other Constellation facilities.

“The uprates that we are talking about here are some of the fastest and most cost-effective ways to for us to add new electrons to the grid today,” Dan Eggers, a senior executive vice president at Constellation, said during an event at the Byron plant. “They allow us to safely increase output on the grid without having to build new plants, bring on new infrastructure on the transmission grid or bring on new employees.”

The company has signed several similar deals this year, though it has now announced upgrade projects across much of its fleet and may have few opportunities for additional transactions.

At Byron, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of Chicago, Constellation this month announced a separate deal with Google. The biggest U.S. nuclear operator plans to invest $4.3 billion to upgrade 11 reactors, boosting total output by 890 megawatts, and supply the power to Google data centers under a 20-year power-purchase agreement.

(Updates to add remarks from energy secretary and Constellation executive.)

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