A proposed nuclear power plant south of Terre Haute, Indiana, would put 12 Xe-100 small modular reactors on land once occupied by a now-demolished coal plant. Amazon is financing development of the 960-megawatt project. In their Monday announcement, the companies said Amazon would be its first electricity customer if the proposal goes ahead.
Responsibility for running the plant would fall to utility company American Electric Power (AEP), while X-energy, a designer of small modular reactors, would provide the units. Construction isn’t underway; the plant remains a development proposal. The reactors would feed the public electric grid, unlike many recently announced power projects, and Amazon says the electricity would also supply its data centers.
This is the second commercial agreement Amazon and X-energy have reached, at three times the size of the deal they announced two years earlier. In October 2024, Amazon led a $700 million Series C-1 funding round for X-energy. Their stated longer-term aim is 5 gigawatts of additional U.S. nuclear generating capacity by 2039.
Meeting that ambitious schedule requires X-energy to complete a smaller undertaking first: its first power plant, planned for Dow Chemical’s Seadrift site southeast of Houston, Texas. Four Xe-100 reactors would generate electricity and heat for the chemical plant there.
Work on building the Seadrift reactors hasn’t started. According to X-energy, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is in the final stages of reviewing its construction permit. Separately, Texas recently filed a lawsuit concerning the Dow site, alleging “habitual non-compliance” with regulations and permits governing water and solid waste. The accusations are allegations by the state, rather than established findings.
Indiana’s plans therefore hinge on a design whose initial four-reactor power plant hasn’t reached the construction stage, before it is used for a dozen reactors there. Neither Amazon’s funding nor its position as a prospective electricity buyer resolves the challenge of getting those plants built.
For startups and major cloud-computing companies, small modular reactors, or SMRs, represent a possible route out of the nuclear industry’s slump. The latest U.S. nuclear plants ran far over budget and fell behind schedule. X-energy and similar companies want to avoid repeating that experience by making smaller reactors in large quantities, with the aim of controlling both costs and construction timetables.
That manufacturing approach has yet to demonstrate the hoped-for results. According to experts, roughly a decade often passes before mass manufacturing yields benefits. The prospect of repeatable production thus comes well before any savings it may eventually deliver.
On the stock market, X-energy has already seen sharp swings. Its April Nasdaq debut followed an initial public offering at $23 a share. Enthusiastic investors sent the stock 27% higher during its first day of trading. Since then, its shares have lost nearly two-thirds of their value.
The Amazon deal prompted an early gain of about 10% for X-energy in pre-market trading, but the shares were down less than 2% when the source report was published. At Seadrift, the reactor supplier’s next concrete milestone is to finish the permit review and begin construction of its first power plant.
