Amazon Doubles Down on Nuclear Energy With Deal for Small Reactors

Put Amazon on the list of big technology firms embracing new nuclear technologies to fuel their data centers.

Amazon said Wednesday it’s investing in projects to develop small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs. The announcement comes days after Google unveiled a similar plan, as both companies seek to meet growing energy demands from artificial intelligence and data centers while honoring pledges to reduce carbon emissions.

Amazon is leading a $500 million funding round for X-Energy Reactor, a company that develops small modular nuclear reactors and fuel. It’s also working with utilities in Washington state and Virginia on potential SMR projects. Google said Monday it will purchase energy from small modular nuclear reactors developed by Kairos Power.

The first Kairos Power SMR is intended to come online by 2030. Amazon and X-Energy want to bring more than 5 gigawatts of power projects online by 2039.

Amazon expects four of these reactors will initially generate 320 megawatts of capacity for Energy Northwest but the project could increase to 960 megawatts, enough to power some 770,000 homes. In Virginia, a small modular reactor near an existing Dominion Energy nuclear power station could generate at least 300 megawatts, Amazon’s release said.

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SMR advocates argue that their smaller footprint allows them to be constructed in more places than traditional nuclear reactors. But the technology is still in its early stages of development: Currently, there are no SMRs online yet in the United States, and only one SMR design, from NuScale Power, has been approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

An upper module mockup of NuScale's small modular reactor facility. Credit: NuScale

The announcements come as tech companies scour the nation for electricity to power their increasingly power-hungry data centers. Already, Amazon and Microsoft have struck deals to buy large amounts of power from legacy nuclear plants. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

But small modular reactors have proved more elusive. The U.S. government and private firms have been trying to advance the technology for years, but it has been slow going.

The industry was dealt a setback recently when NuScale’s plans to bring a small modular reactor online in Idaho collapsed. The projected price of the electricity kept spiraling upward and ultimately became too expensive for the small municipal utilities in Utah that had signed up to buy it.

Tech industry power needs, however, are giving SMRs new momentum. AI developers see the plants as a potential major source of power that can scale quickly and provide energy around-the-clock.

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Data centers - and tech companies’ willingness to pay above-market prices for reliable and carbon-free energy - could be what SMRs need to establish themselves, said Jacopo Buongiorno, professor of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“You start by selling electricity to a customer that is willing to pay a little bit more,” he said. “Then as your own costs come down, you start penetrating markets where the competition is a little bit tougher - for example, the grid.”

The Amazon deal marks a shift from the tech industry’s historical reluctance to buy nuclear power unless someone else pays to build the infrastructure, X-Energy CEO J. Clay Sell said. “Today, the story changed because Amazon said, ‘We are prepared to be that equity,’” he said.

There are still numerous hurdles to clear.

Even if federal regulators approve construction licenses, the new reactors still face some of the same challenges as older nuclear technologies.

Like traditional fission reactors, SMRs create nuclear waste that would be stored on-site. While the new designs are pitched as safer than legacy nuclear plants, they produce significantly less power, meaning more of the plants would need to be built, each having the potential to ignite community concerns about nuclear safety and environmental issues.

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