Amazon announced on Monday that it will finance the development of a 960‑megawatt nuclear power project in Indiana, becoming the first buyer of its electricity. The plant will be run by utility American Electric Power, while X‑energy, a designer of small modular reactors that went public in April, will supply the reactors. The facility will house twelve Xe‑100 small modular reactors on the former coal‑plant site just south of Terre Haute.
This agreement marks the second commercial deal between Amazon and X‑energy and is three times larger than the first partnership announced two years ago. Amazon led a $700 million Series C‑1 financing round for X‑energy in October 2024. Both companies say they aim to add five gigawatts of new nuclear capacity in the United States by 2039.
Unlike many newly announced projects, the reactors will be tied to the public electric grid, although Amazon intends to use the power for its data centers as well. The schedule still hinges on X‑energy successfully delivering its inaugural plant at Dow Chemical’s Seadrift facility southeast of Houston, Texas. That site, which will host four Xe‑100 reactors to supply heat and electricity to the chemical plant, is currently embroiled in a Texas lawsuit alleging repeated violations of water and solid‑waste regulations. X‑energy has not yet broken ground at Seadrift, but its construction permit is in the final stages of review by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Start‑up firms and large cloud providers are betting that small modular reactors like X‑energy’s can revive the nuclear industry, which has struggled with costly overruns and delayed timelines on recent U.S. builds. By shrinking reactor size, companies hope that mass‑production methods will keep costs and schedules in check, though experts warn that the benefits of mass manufacturing often take a decade to materialize.
X‑energy debuted on Nasdaq in April at $23 per share, jumping 27 percent on its first day of trading. Since then, the stock has fallen by nearly two‑thirds. News of the Amazon agreement lifted X‑energy shares about 10 percent in pre‑market trading, though they were down slightly under 2 percent at the time of publication.