Amazon is backing a plan to put a dozen small nuclear reactors on the site of a retired coal plant in Indiana. On Monday, October 19, reactor developer X-energy and utility American Electric Power (AEP) announced a joint development agreement to study a proposed 960-megawatt nuclear plant, with Amazon providing project development funding.
The plan
The proposed plant would use 12 of X-energy's Xe-100 small modular reactors, each rated at 80 megawatts. It would be built near the former Breed Generating Station in Sullivan County, Indiana, an AEP-owned brownfield site that TechCrunch places just south of Terre Haute.
Each company has a defined role:
- X-energy supplies the reactor technology.
- AEP, which has run a nuclear plant through its Indiana Michigan Power utility for more than 50 years, would operate the plant.
- Amazon provides what X-energy calls "milestone-based development capital" and would be the first customer to buy power from the plant once it is running.
The power would serve both the regional grid and Amazon's data centers, according to Amazon. The project is at the feasibility stage, and the announcement doesn't include a construction start date or a date for the plant to come online.
How the Xe-100 works
The Xe-100 is a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor that uses helium as a coolant and runs on TRISO fuel, which encases uranium in layers of ceramic. The U.S. Department of Energy has described TRISO as the "most robust nuclear fuel on earth" for its ability to withstand extreme temperatures without melting. Amazon says plants using the Xe-100 can use air-cooled, water-cooled or hybrid cooling depending on the site.
Part of a 5-gigawatt goal
This is the second project under a collaboration between Amazon and X-energy that aims to bring more than 5 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity to the U.S. grid by 2039. The first is the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility with Energy Northwest in Washington state. TechCrunch reports the Indiana project is three times larger than that first deal.
Amazon's ties to X-energy go back to 2024, when it led the company's Series C-1 funding round, which closed at $700 million. X-energy says the Indiana plant is its third announced commercial project in the U.S. and fourth worldwide, within a commercial pipeline of about 11.5 gigawatts.
Amazon says the plant could create more than 1,000 construction jobs and more than 100 permanent jobs. "We're looking to develop nearly a gigawatt of carbon-free power for the regional grid and pay our full costs without passing them to others," said Josh Weissman, Amazon's VP of Data Center Infrastructure Capacity Delivery.
The first plant comes first
X-energy has yet to complete its first plant. Its debut deployment is a proposed four-reactor facility supplying electricity and industrial steam to a Dow manufacturing site on the Texas Gulf Coast. X-energy says its construction permit application is in the final phases of review by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. TechCrunch reports that X-energy has yet to break ground there, and that the Dow site, called Seadrift, has been at the center of a lawsuit by the state of Texas accusing the plant of "habitual non-compliance" with water and solid-waste regulations and permits.
X-energy went public on the Nasdaq in April at $23 per share. According to TechCrunch, its shares have fallen by nearly two-thirds since then, and rose about 10% in premarket trading on Monday after the Amazon news.
