Amazon to fund 12 small nuclear reactors in Indiana

Amazon, American Electric Power (AEP) and X-energy announced the project Monday: AEP would operate the plant, built on the site of a demolished coal facility just south of Terre Haute, while X-energy supplies 12 of its Xe-100 small modular reactors. It is the second commercial agreement between Amazon and X-energy and is three times the size of their first deal, announced two years ago. Amazon has backed X-energy heavily, leading a $700 million Series C-1 round in October 2024, and both firms have set a longer-term goal of 5 gigawatts of new U.S. nuclear generating capacity by 2039.

Most newly announced power plants stay off the public grid entirely, but this one is different: the reactors would tie into it, even as Amazon says the output will also feed its data centers.

The companies’ timeline still hinges on X-energy delivering its first plant, at a Dow Chemical site southeast of Houston called Seadrift, which will host four Xe-100 reactors providing heat and electricity to the chemical plant. X-energy has not yet broken ground there, and the site is now the subject of a Texas lawsuit accusing the plant of “habitual non-compliance” with water and solid-waste regulations and permits; the company says its construction permit is in the final phase of review by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Small modular reactors like X-energy’s are central to a bet by startups and large cloud computing firms that shrinking the reactor design and mass-manufacturing it can pull the nuclear industry out of a slump marked by budget overruns and delayed timelines on the most recent full-scale U.S. plants — though experts caution that mass manufacturing’s payoff typically takes roughly a decade to materialize. X-energy went public on the Nasdaq in April at $23 a share; the price jumped 27% on day one, but the stock has since dropped by nearly two-thirds. The company reportedly drew acquisition interest from Intel and Qualcomm five months ago at valuations of as much as $5 billion. Word of the Amazon deal lifted X-energy’s premarket share price by about 10%, though by publication time the stock had slipped back to a loss of less than 2% on the day.

Why it matters

The deal underscores how much of the current U.S. nuclear buildout is being driven and bankrolled by cloud and AI infrastructure demand rather than utilities acting alone, with Amazon now underwriting X-energy’s path to commercial scale directly.