By Hamza Faisal

Amazon is going nuclear — again, and three times bigger. The company announced on Monday that it will fund the development of a 960-megawatt nuclear plant in Indiana, built from 12 small modular reactors, and would be the first customer to buy its power under a long-term contract.

The project pairs Amazon with utility giant American Electric Power (AEP), which would own and operate the plant, and X-energy, which would supply the reactors. It is the second commercial agreement between Amazon and X-energy — and three times the size of the first, announced about two years ago.

A coal site's second act

The plant would rise on the site of a demolished coal power station just south of Terre Haute — the former Breed Generating Station in Sullivan County, once run by AEP subsidiary Indiana Michigan Power. Twelve of X-energy's Xe-100 reactors, each rated at 80 megawatts, would be arranged in three blocks of four for 960 megawatts total.

The Xe-100 is a high-temperature gas-cooled design that circulates helium through the core and uses TRISO fuel — uranium particles sealed in protective coatings designed to withstand extreme heat without melting. Unlike many newly announced power plants, this one would feed the public electric grid, with Amazon's data centers also drawing from it.

Why Amazon is writing the checks

Amazon is serving as the project's development funder, with funding tied to milestones, and intends to purchase the plant's output under a long-term contract. AEP said that contract would cover the facility's cost and operations for its full duration — shielding the utility's existing customers from the financial risk that has sunk new nuclear builds for decades.

"All necessary capital protections and financial safeguards," is how AEP chairman and CEO Bill Fehrman described the arrangement. For Amazon, the appeal is straightforward: firm, round-the-clock, carbon-free power for data centers whose electricity appetite keeps growing with cloud computing and AI.

Amazon has been building toward this for years — it led X-energy's $700 million Series C-1 round in October 2024, and the two companies say they ultimately plan to bring 5 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity online in the U.S. by 2039.

Plenty of runway — and risk — ahead

This is still a development agreement, not a construction decision. No cost estimate, no schedule, and no final investment decision have been disclosed, and the Xe-100 has never been deployed commercially. The companies' aggressive timeline hinges on X-energy delivering its first plant — four Xe-100 units at a Dow Chemical site southeast of Houston, Texas — where the construction permit is in the final phases of Nuclear Regulatory Commission review. That site, called Seadrift, was recently sued by the state of Texas over alleged water and solid-waste violations, and X-energy has yet to break ground.

If it all comes together, the companies estimate more than 1,000 construction jobs and over 100 permanent roles at the Indiana site. For now, though, Amazon's 12-reactor bet is a funded plan on a coal plant's grave — with the hard part still ahead.

By Hamza Faisal