Amazon to fund 12 X-energy small modular reactors at former Indiana coal plant

The deal

Amazon will fund the development of a proposed 960-megawatt nuclear power plant in Indiana and act as the first customer for its electricity, the companies announced on Monday. According to TechCrunch, utility American Electric Power (AEP) will operate the plant, while reactor designer X-energy will supply the technology.

The facility will be assembled from 12 of X-energy's Xe-100 small modular reactors and built on the site of a demolished coal power plant just south of Terre Haute. TechCrunch reports that this is the second commercial agreement between Amazon and X-energy, and that it is three times larger than the first, which was announced two years ago.

The relationship already runs deep financially. Amazon led a $700 million Series C-1 investment in X-energy in October 2024, and the two companies have said they ultimately want to build 5 gigawatts of new nuclear generating capacity in the United States by 2039.

Grid-connected, but built for compute

Unusually for a hyperscaler power arrangement, the reactors will feed the public electric grid rather than serving a private data center campus. Amazon says the electricity would also power its data centers, giving the company a claim on generation that remains part of the broader system.

Everything hinges on Seadrift

The aggressive timeline for Indiana rests on X-energy first delivering its debut project: a four-reactor installation at Dow Chemical's Seadrift site southeast of Houston, Texas, meant to supply the chemical plant with heat and electricity. According to TechCrunch, X-energy has not yet broken ground there, and its construction permit is in the final phases of review by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Seadrift has also attracted legal scrutiny. The state of Texas has filed a lawsuit accusing the site of persistent violations of water and solid-waste regulations and permits.

A manufacturing bet with a long fuse

Startups and large cloud providers are counting on small modular reactors to pull the nuclear industry out of its slump, after the most recent U.S. plants suffered severe budget overruns and schedule slips. The core idea is that shrinking the reactor allows factory production, which in turn keeps costs and timelines under control. TechCrunch notes that experts remain cautious on the pace: mass manufacturing often takes roughly a decade before the benefits materialize.

X-energy itself debuted on the Nasdaq in April through an IPO priced at $23 per share. Investor enthusiasm lifted the stock 27% on its first day of trading, but the shares have since fallen by nearly two-thirds. News of the Amazon agreement pushed them up about 10% in pre-market trading, though they were down by less than 2% by the time TechCrunch published.

Why it matters

The deal is one of the clearest signals yet of how far cloud providers will go to secure electricity for AI and other compute workloads. Rather than waiting for utilities to add capacity, Amazon is directly funding generation and locking in a position as the first customer, while still routing the power through the public grid.

It is also a high-stakes test of the small modular reactor thesis. No X-energy reactor has been built anywhere yet, the first project's permit is still under regulatory review, and its site faces state litigation. If Seadrift slips, Indiana slips with it. If it succeeds, the 960-megawatt Indiana order could become the template for the 5 gigawatts the partners envision by 2039.