Amazon Funds 12 Small Nuclear Reactors at a Former Coal Plant
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Where coal once burned, data centers could soon run on nuclear power: Amazon is funding the development of a 960-megawatt nuclear plant in Indiana. Twelve small modular reactors (SMRs) from the start-up X-energy are to be built there, and the utility American Electric Power (AEP) is set to operate the facility. The three companies announced the plan on Monday.
Twelve Helium-Cooled Reactors
The site is the grounds of the retired Breed coal plant in Sullivan County, south of the city of Terre Haute. AEP already owns the land. The plan calls for X-energy’s Xe-100, a gas-cooled high-temperature reactor with 80 megawatts of output each, which is cooled with helium and uses special spherical fuel elements. Twelve of them add up to almost one gigawatt. The power is to flow into the public grid, and Amazon, as the first buyer, also wants to use it for its data centers.
The partners are not saying how much money Amazon is putting into the project. The company is providing development capital that will be paid out in tranches as the project progresses, and, according to the announcement, it will cover its full project costs itself rather than passing them on to other electricity customers. For now, the plant is only a plan: The three partners have signed a joint development agreement to study its feasibility. They have not named a start date for construction or operation.
Amazon’s Big Nuclear Plan
For Amazon and X-energy, it is their second joint power plant project, and it is three times the size of the first. In October 2024, Amazon led a $700 million (about €625 million) funding round in X-energy and announced a project with the utility Energy Northwest in Washington State. Together, the companies want to bring more than 5 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity onto the U.S. grid by 2039. Just a few weeks ago, Amazon also signed a 20-year deal with Constellation for the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Maryland, which is set to increase the plant’s output by about 190 megawatts.
Amazon is not alone in this strategy. Microsoft is having Constellation restart a reactor at the former Three Mile Island nuclear plant, Google is betting on small reactors from the start-up Kairos Power, and Meta has also secured nuclear power for its A.I. data centers. Behind the rush is the enormous demand for electricity driven by A.I. How quickly such projects can be approved was shown recently by the U.S. nuclear regulator, which cleared the first commercial small modular reactor in the U.S. in Tennessee.
The Skepticism Remains
The timeline is ambitious, though, as TechCrunch points out, because X-energy has not yet built a single reactor. Its first plant, with four Xe-100 units, is set to be built at a site owned by the chemical company Dow in Texas, but construction there has not yet started, and the construction permit is still in the final phase of review. In addition, the state of Texas has sued Dow over alleged violations of environmental rules at the site.
There are also more fundamental doubts: The nuclear plants most recently built in the U.S. ran far over budget and behind schedule. The SMR industry hopes that mass production will bring costs down, but experts say it often takes about a decade for such effects to show. On the stock market, the euphoria has already faded: X-energy went public on the Nasdaq in April at $23 (about €20.50) per share, and the stock has since lost almost two-thirds of its value. The Amazon news lifted shares by about 10 percent in premarket trading, but little of that gain held up once regular trading began.
