Amazon has signed an agreement with X-energy and American Electric Power to fund construction of a new nuclear energy facility in Indiana. The plant would be built at the site of the defunct coal-fueled Breed Generating Station in Fairbanks, in Sullivan County, and is intended to supply up to 960 megawatts of carbon-free power to the regional grid and to Amazon's data centers.
The project calls for 12 Xe-100 small modular reactors, an advanced reactor design that is still in development and licensing and has not yet been proven. According to Amazon, the reactors can be cooled with air, water, or a combination of the two, which the company says should allow them to be used in areas with limited water without adding to local water demand.
Amazon has not announced a construction or operation timeline for the facility. The company says the project could create 1,000 construction jobs and 100 permanent positions. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
The Indiana site carries historical weight. The state was home to the Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant, a famously expensive project that was abandoned half-finished in 1983 after $2.5 billion had already been spent on it. Demolition work there has been ongoing since 2008. Because Amazon's agreement terms are undisclosed, the cost of the new facility cannot be compared with Marble Hill's.
The Fairbanks project is the second nuclear effort Amazon and X-energy have pursued together. The two companies aim to work with regional utilities to deploy more than 5 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity in the US by 2039. In October of last year, Amazon offered an early look at its first planned nuclear plant, the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility in Washington, which is also designed to use 12 advanced reactors and create local jobs, with construction not expected to begin until the end of this decade.
Amazon is among several technology companies, including Meta, Microsoft, and Google, developing their own nuclear energy projects to power AI data centers. Earlier this month, Amazon published a lengthy blog post outlining commitments that included investing in energy grid infrastructure, part of an effort to address growing negativity around data center projects. The company noted that the benefits of such facilities will take many years to materialize.
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