Amazon Funds 12 Small Nuclear Reactors at a Former Coal Plant
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden
Amazon is backing 12 small nuclear reactors at a retired coal plant in Indiana. It’s meant for the grid and Amazon’s data centers, but the project is still only on paper.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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Amazon is putting its name behind a very large nuclear bet in Indiana: a 960-megawatt plant planned for the retired Breed coal site in Sullivan County, south of Terre Haute. The deal brings together Amazon, the start-up X-energy and utility American Electric Power, which already owns the land and would operate the facility.
The plan is to build 12 of X-energy’s Xe-100 reactors, each rated at 80 megawatts. They’re helium-cooled, gas-cooled high-temperature reactors using special spherical fuel elements. The output would go to the public grid, with Amazon lined up as the first buyer for its data centers.
Nobody is saying how much Amazon is committing. What the companies did say is that Amazon is providing development capital in stages as the project advances, and that the plant’s full costs would be covered by the project itself rather than pushed onto other electricity customers. For now, though, the project is just a joint development agreement meant to test whether it is feasible. There is no construction start date and no operating date.
This is also not Amazon’s first swing at nuclear. In October 2024, it led a $700 million funding round in X-energy and unveiled a separate project with Energy Northwest in Washington state. The two companies want to bring more than 5 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity onto the U.S. grid by 2039. Amazon also signed a 20-year deal just weeks ago with Constellation for the Calvert Cliffs plant in Maryland, which is expected to add about 190 megawatts.
The rush is happening because AI chews through electricity, and because the industry thinks nuclear can help. Microsoft is backing a reactor restart at Three Mile Island, Google is betting on Kairos Power, and Meta has also lined up nuclear supply for its AI data centers. But the skepticism is still sitting there, large and unignored: X-energy has not built a reactor yet, its first project in Texas has not started construction, and even that permit is still under final review. Investors have noticed too. X-energy went public in April at $23 a share and has since lost almost two-thirds of its value.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is a classic AI-era power scramble: giant tech firms buying options on future electrons because the grid is too slow for their appetite. Nuclear gets treated like a magic solve, but the hard part is still the boring part — permits, costs, and actually building the thing. The market’s wobble says plenty.
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