Amazon funds 12-reactor nuclear project at Indiana coal site
Amazon is funding development of a proposed 960-megawatt nuclear power plant on the site of a demolished coal plant south of Terre Haute, Indiana. The facility would comprise 12 Xe-100 small modular reactors supplied by X-energy, while American Electric Power (AEP) would operate the plant. Amazon would become the first customer to buy its electricity.
The proposed station would be connected to the public electric grid, unlike some recently announced power projects, and Amazon says the output would also serve its data centres. The agreement is Amazon and X-energy’s second commercial deal and is three times larger than the one the companies announced two years ago.
A larger commitment to small modular reactors
Amazon has already invested heavily in X-energy, leading its $700 million Series C-1 financing round in October 2024. Together, the companies have said they intend to build 5 gigawatts of new nuclear generating capacity in the United States by 2039.
The Indiana plan places Amazon’s energy procurement alongside its wider infrastructure relationships: the company’s $5 billion commitment to Amazon’s $5 billion Anthropic investment also links major cloud demand with AWS investment. In this case, the proposed reactors would provide generation for the wider grid as well as power associated with Amazon’s data-centre needs.
X-energy designs the Xe-100 as a small modular reactor, or SMR. Companies pursuing this model aim to reduce the cost and scheduling problems that affected recent large US nuclear projects by shrinking reactor designs and using mass manufacturing. The source notes, however, that experts expect manufacturing scale benefits may take roughly a decade to emerge.
Execution depends on the first X-energy plant
The schedule for Indiana remains dependent on X-energy delivering its first power plant, planned for Dow Chemical’s Seadrift facility southeast of Houston, Texas. Seadrift is designed to host four Xe-100 reactors that would supply heat and electricity to the chemical plant.
X-energy has not yet started construction at Seadrift. It said its construction permit is in the final stages of review by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Texas site has also been the subject of a state lawsuit alleging “habitual non-compliance” with water and solid-waste regulations and permits.
X-energy went public on Nasdaq in April at $23 per share. Its shares rose 27% on the first day of trading, then declined by nearly two-thirds; news of the Amazon agreement lifted the stock by about 10% in pre-market trading, although it was down by less than 2% at publication.
What the proposal means for power buyers
The Indiana announcement illustrates the scale at which cloud companies are seeking future electricity supply, but it does not remove the permitting, construction and manufacturing hurdles ahead. For businesses assessing long-term power procurement, the practical implication is to track regulatory progress and first-of-a-kind delivery milestones separately from announced megawatt capacity.