In October 2024 Amazon announced three agreements to develop nuclear power using small modular reactors (SMRs), part of its plan to match its growing data center electricity demand with carbon-free energy. The centerpiece was a project with Energy Northwest and the reactor developer X-energy in Washington state: an initial four advanced SMRs generating roughly 320 megawatts, with the design expandable to about 960 megawatts - enough, Amazon said, to power the equivalent of more than 770,000 U.S. homes.
The deal package went beyond a single site. Amazon led an investment round in X-energy to support manufacturing capacity for the company’s reactor and fuel technology, with Amazon describing support for more than five gigawatts of new nuclear projects in the United States by 2039. A separate agreement with Dominion Energy explored an SMR project of at least 300 megawatts near the existing North Anna nuclear station in Virginia, the heart of the country’s densest data center region.
The announcement landed within the same window as Google’s Kairos Power agreement and shortly after Microsoft’s Three Mile Island restart, and together the three signaled a coordinated bet by the largest cloud and AI operators that small modular reactors - standardized, factory-built nuclear units - could become a repeatable way to add round-the-clock carbon-free power for AI data centers, even though no commercial SMR was yet operating in the United States at the time.