Amazon is putting its weight behind nuclear power in a big way. The tech giant announced on Monday that it will fund the development of a proposed 960-megawatt nuclear plant in Indiana — 12 small modular reactors built on the site of a retired coal power station — in a deal that could become one of the largest advanced-reactor projects ever announced in the United States.
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| An Amazon Web Services data center in Manassas, Virginia — file photo (Bloomberg). |
If the project is built, the reactors would feed power into the regional electric grid while also supporting Amazon's ever-growing data centers, which are getting hungrier for electricity as artificial intelligence workloads explode. But there is a catch: the agreement is only a first step toward feasibility, not a commitment to build. No construction date, budget, or final investment decision has been announced.
Why Amazon Wants Nuclear
The announcement reflects a hard reality of the AI era: data centers need enormous amounts of reliable, around-the-clock electricity, and renewable sources alone cannot always deliver it. Nuclear power offers steady baseload generation with no carbon emissions at the point of production — a combination that fits neatly with Amazon's public goal of reaching net-zero carbon emissions across its operations by 2040.
Amazon is not buying electricity the way it usually does. Under the arrangement, the company would serve as a project development funder and, if the plant is built, would become its first customer through a long-term power purchase contract. That contract is designed to cover the costs of the facility and its operations for its duration — a structure that utility partner American Electric Power (AEP) says is intended to shield its existing customers from the financial risks of developing new nuclear capacity.
"Our agreements with Amazon and X-energy will provide all necessary capital protections and financial safeguards that we have said are essential for any potential nuclear project to move forward," said AEP Chairman, President and CEO Bill Fehrman in the announcement.
Unlike some recently announced power plants built exclusively to serve a single data center campus, this facility would be connected to the public electric grid — though Amazon says the power would also support its computing operations.
The Site: From Coal to Atoms
The proposed plant would rise on land near the retired Breed Generating Station in Sullivan County, Indiana, just south of Terre Haute — a site AEP already owns. Reusing a former coal-plant location is no accident: the existing transmission corridors and industrial infrastructure can be repurposed, reducing the need for new power lines and limiting disruption compared with building on an undeveloped site.
Twelve X-energy Xe-100 reactors, each rated at about 80 megawatts, would combine for the full 960 megawatts of capacity. AEP says the units would be added in phases — configured in three groups of four reactors, each group producing 320 megawatts — and connected directly to the regional electric grid. If the plant is constructed, AEP would own and operate it.
The companies estimate the project could create more than 1,000 construction jobs and over 100 permanent roles. AEP says the plant could operate for more than 60 years once running. Early field work and environmental surveys around the site began in September, according to AEP subsidiary Indiana Michigan Power — though the partners stress that a final investment decision has not been made.
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| A cutaway rendering of X-energy's Xe-100 small modular reactor, the design planned for the Indiana project (POWER Magazine). |
The Reactor: Small, Advanced, Untested
At the heart of the plan is X-energy's Xe-100, a small modular reactor design that works very differently from the large conventional reactors that dominate America's existing nuclear fleet. Each 80-megawatt unit uses high-temperature gas-cooled technology with helium coolant and an advanced fuel called TRISO.
The design is built around an unusual safety claim: the reactor's own physics are supposed to prevent a meltdown without any active safety systems kicking in, and the units can be cooled with air or water depending on the site. Small modular reactors are designed in factories and assembled on site, which supporters say can cut costs and construction times compared with the massive bespoke plants of the past.
There is, however, a significant asterisk. The Xe-100 has never been deployed commercially. X-energy has yet to break ground on its first planned installation: a four-reactor plant at Dow Chemical's Seadrift facility southeast of Houston, Texas, which would supply the chemical complex with heat and electricity. The company says its construction permit is in the final phases of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's review process.
The Texas project has also drawn controversy. The site recently became the subject of a lawsuit filed by the state of Texas, which accuses the plant of "habitual non-compliance" with water and solid-waste regulations and permits, according to reporting by TechCrunch. In other words, the Indiana plan's aggressive timeline depends on X-energy successfully delivering a first-of-its-kind plant that has not yet started construction.
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| File photo of cooling towers at a nuclear power station — illustrative only. |
What This Means
The Indiana project is Amazon's second commercial agreement with X-energy and is three times larger than the first — a 320-megawatt facility planned in Washington state that was announced two years ago. Together, the two companies have said they ultimately aim to build more than 5 gigawatts of new nuclear generating capacity across the United States by 2039.
That ambition rests on a deep financial relationship. Amazon led X-energy's $700 million Series C-1 financing round in October 2024, capital directed toward completing the reactor's design, advancing licensing, and building a fuel-manufacturing facility in Tennessee. X-energy went public in April of this year.
Amazon is far from alone in this bet. Across the tech industry, hyperscale data-center operators are scrambling to lock in firm power as electricity demand climbs on the back of cloud computing, electrification, and manufacturing growth. Advanced nuclear — with its promise of clean, constant output — has become one of the most talked-about answers. But talk is cheap, and SMR developers have a long history of missed timelines and ballooning budgets.
What distinguishes this deal from many others is the structure: a creditworthy anchor customer (Amazon) committed to buying the power for the long haul, an established utility (AEP) to own and operate the plant, and a brownfield site with existing infrastructure. Those are precisely the ingredients that nuclear experts say small-reactor projects need to get off the ground.
What Happens Next
The immediate next steps are technical and regulatory, not physical. The companies will complete feasibility studies, environmental assessments, and engineering work while X-energy pushes its first-of-a-kind Seadrift plant through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's licensing process. Only after that comes a final investment decision — the point at which the project either advances to construction or stalls.
For Sullivan County residents, the promise is jobs and a major industrial investment on a site that once ran on coal. For Amazon, it is a down payment on the vast amounts of electricity its AI ambitions will require. And for the American nuclear industry, it is another high-profile test of whether small modular reactors can finally move from renderings and promises to steel, concrete, and actual electrons on the grid.
Whether the twelve reactors ever materialize will depend less on Monday's announcement than on what happens in the years — and licensing reviews — ahead. But one thing is clear: the race to power the AI era has gone nuclear, and Indiana is now on the map.
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