NRC approves X-energy's first four commercial SMRs at a Dow chemical plant in Texas

X-energy has received approval from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build its first four commercial reactors, TechCrunch reported on Monday. The construction permit covers four of the company's Xe-100 small modular reactors (SMRs) at a Dow chemical plant in Texas, and according to X-energy it is the first approval granted for an advanced nuclear reactor at an industrial site in the United States.

Each Xe-100 unit is designed to produce 80 megawatts of electricity and 200 megawatts of heat, output intended to serve both power and process-energy needs at the Dow facility.

A milestone with a long runway

The approval is a landmark for the SMR sector, but it does not put power on the grid anytime soon. No small modular reactor is currently operating commercially in the US, and X-energy does not expect the Dow reactors to be operational until the early 2030s, according to TechCrunch.

That gap illustrates the core promise and the open question of the SMR movement. Proponents argue that shrinking reactors will speed up construction and reduce costs compared with conventional nuclear mega-projects, but as TechCrunch points out, those advantages have yet to be demonstrated. X-energy itself expects its first reactors to be expensive, with the hope that later units become cheaper and faster to build.

Safety claims under scrutiny

X-energy's design circulates helium gas over uranium-containing fuel pellets, an approach the company says is safer than many existing reactors. The Union of Concerned Scientists has challenged both the safety claims and the pace of the review. Edwin Lyman, the organization's director of nuclear power safety, said in a statement that the NRC managed its timeline only by deferring critical safety questions to a later date, arguing those issues should have been fully resolved before construction was authorized.

Powered by hyperscaler demand

The nuclear sector's current momentum is closely tied to cloud computing. Hyperscalers and data center developers are scrambling to secure electricity from virtually any source, and big tech money has flowed into nuclear startups as a result. Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund led X-energy's $500 million Series C-1 round, and Amazon has separately committed to purchasing 5 gigawatts of capacity from the company, TechCrunch reports.

The financial picture is more mixed. X-energy raised $1 billion in an April initial public offering, riding a wave of enthusiasm for nuclear stocks, but investor optimism has tempered since. According to TechCrunch, the permit approval gave the shares only a modest lift, enough to recover the previous week's losses, and the stock still trades at less than half its IPO price.

Why it matters

This approval is the clearest signal yet that advanced reactors can be sited directly at industrial facilities rather than standalone power plants, a co-location model that data center operators are watching closely as they hunt for firm, around-the-clock electricity. For cloud providers weighing nuclear as an answer to surging AI-driven power demand, X-energy's progress is a proof point, but also a caution: the Dow reactors are years from delivering a single megawatt, the economics of first-of-a-kind SMRs remain unproven, and watchdogs are already questioning whether the licensing process moved faster than the safety analysis. Whether this milestone becomes a template or an outlier depends on execution between now and the early 2030s.