Amazon is buying its way into nuclear power — paying to develop the reactors before a single electron flows.
The company announced Monday it will fund development of a proposed 960-megawatt nuclear plant in Indiana, and would be the first customer to buy its power. American Electric Power would own and operate the plant, while X-energy — the small-modular-reactor startup that went public in April — supplies the hardware: 12 of its Xe-100 reactors, arranged in groups of four on the site of a demolished coal plant just south of Terre Haute, the former Breed Generating Station in Sullivan County.
This is the second commercial agreement between Amazon and X-energy, and it's three times the size of the first, announced two years ago. Amazon already led X-energy's $700 million Series C-1 round back in October 2024, and the two companies say they ultimately want to bring 5 gigawatts of new nuclear generating capacity onto the U.S. grid by 2039. News of the deal sent X-energy's shares up about 10% in pre-market trading — a rare good day for a stock that's dropped nearly two-thirds since its $23 IPO debut, per TechCrunch.
The telling detail is structural. Unlike many of the power plants Big Tech is bankrolling, this one feeds the public grid. AEP said the agreement is designed to keep project costs off existing utility customers' bills, with Amazon covering the facility's construction and operating costs through a long-term power purchase agreement. Amazon isn't building a private island of compute here; it's underwriting public infrastructure and buying first dibs on the electrons. Roughly 1,000 construction jobs and more than 100 permanent roles would come to the area if the project advances.
But the timeline rests on a shaky foundation. Everything depends on X-energy delivering its first plant — four Xe-100 reactors at the Seadrift project on a Dow Chemical site southeast of Houston — and construction there hasn't even started. The Seadrift site is meanwhile at the center of a lawsuit filed by the state of Texas accusing the plant of "habitual non-compliance" with water and solid-waste regulations. X-energy says its construction permit is in the final phases of Nuclear Regulatory Commission review, but the core SMR promise — that mass manufacturing will keep costs and schedules in line — is still theory. Experts told TechCrunch the factory benefits of mass manufacturing often take about a decade to materialize.
That's the real story. The AI buildout's power hunger has moved from keynote slogans to joint development agreements and brownfield remediation. Nuclear is no longer Big Tech's moonshot pitch — it's the playbook, and the constraint isn't money anymore, it's execution. Amazon's model is to pay for the development work, let the utility operate the plant, and buy the power first. If Seadrift proves the reactors work, Indiana becomes the template. If it doesn't, Amazon just bought a very expensive lesson in reactor economics.
— via TechCrunch