Amazon has signed an agreement with X-energy and American Electric Power to fund construction of a new nuclear plant in Indiana. The facility would replace the defunct coal-fueled Breed Generating Station in Fairbanks, Sullivan County, and generate up to 960 megawatts of carbon-free electricity for the regional power grid and Amazon's data centers.
The plant would use 12 Xe-100 small modular reactors (SMRs), an advanced design still undergoing development and licensing. X-energy says these reactors can be cooled with air, water, or a hybrid approach, allowing deployment in water-constrained regions without straining local water supplies.
Amazon estimates the project could create 1,000 construction jobs and 100 permanent positions. No construction timeline or operation date has been announced. Terms of the agreement remain undisclosed.
This is the second nuclear project Amazon and X-energy are pursuing together. They aim to deploy more than 5 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity across the US by 2039. Amazon's first planned facility, the Cascade Advanced Energy Project in Washington, is similarly designed to use 12 advanced reactors. Construction on that project is not expected to begin until the end of this decade.
The Indiana project arrives as Amazon joins Meta, Microsoft, and Google in exploring nuclear energy to power AI data centers. Amazon earlier this month published a blog post outlining energy grid infrastructure investments as part of broader efforts to address concerns about data center expansion. The company acknowledged that benefits from these new facilities remain years away.
Indiana's nuclear history includes the Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant, abandoned half-finished in 1983 after $2.5 billion was spent on it. Demolition of that site has been ongoing since 2008.