Amazon Funds Plan for 960-MW Nuclear Plant With 12 Small Reactors in Indiana
Amazon will fund development of a proposed 960-megawatt nuclear plant in Sullivan County, Indiana, and would be the first buyer of its power if the plant is built. TechCrunch
The plant would use 12 Xe-100 small modular reactors, smaller units designed to be built in factories and installed together. X-energy would supply the reactors. American Electric Power (AEP) would operate the plant.
The site is a demolished coal plant just south of Terre Haute, identified by X-energy as land near the former Breed coal plant in Sullivan County, Indiana. X-energy
Power from the reactors would feed the public electric grid. Amazon would be the prospective off-taker, the contracted buyer, rather than using the power only on its own site. The scale has changed from earlier work.
This Indiana deal is the second commercial agreement between Amazon and X-energy. It is three times larger than their first agreement announced two years earlier. Amazon led a $700 million Series C-1 round in X-energy in October 2024.
Amazon and X-energy plan to build 5 gigawatts of new nuclear generating capacity in the United States by 2039. That target makes Indiana one increment in a larger deployment pipeline. It is a plan, not capacity under construction.
X-energy debuted on Nasdaq in April in an IPO priced at $23 per share. Its first plant, at Dow's Seadrift site southeast of Houston, will host four Xe-100 reactors. X-energy had yet to break ground at Seadrift as of October 19, 2026.
The parties entered a Joint Development Agreement to study feasibility of the Indiana project. Amazon published an official announcement on October 15 titled 'Amazon plans nearly 1 GW nuclear energy project in Indiana' covering the X-energy and AEP project. X-energy published a release titled 'X-energy, Amazon, American Electric Power Partner to Bring SMR Project ...' dated October 19, 2026. An earlier Amazon agreement, described in October 2024, involved reactors to be constructed, owned and operated by Energy Northwest and expected to generate roughly 320 megawatts of capacity.
The broader context here is sequencing from first projects to multi-unit builds. Seadrift is a four-unit project still in pre-construction. Indiana proposes 12 units at a single site. That order matters for licensing, supply chain, fuel, and construction learning rates.
In my view, enterprise technology buyers should read this as procurement from grid-connected nuclear rather than dedicated power for one location. Feasibility, not final investment decision, is the current phase. The useful questions are schedule discipline at Seadrift, regulatory progress for the Xe-100, and whether a 12-unit coal-to-nuclear conversion can hold together on cost and interconnection. If those pieces land, 960 megawatts of firm capacity on the public grid would give large power buyers more headroom than any single-site efficiency gain could.
