Amazon backs 12-reactor nuclear project at a retired Indiana coal plant

Amazon, American Electric Power, and X-energy signed a joint development agreement on Monday, October 19, to study building a 960-megawatt small modular reactor (SMR) project on the site of a retired coal plant in Sullivan County, Indiana. If it goes ahead, the plan calls for 12 of X-energy's Xe-100 reactors, each generating 80 megawatts, arranged in three groups of four.

The project would sit on the former Breed Generating Station, a coal plant AEP's Indiana Michigan Power subsidiary has already retired. It is the second grid-scale project under a broader Amazon–X-energy collaboration aimed at adding more than 5 gigawatts of new US nuclear capacity by 2039 — the first being the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility now in development in Washington state. The announcement lands amid a wave of hyperscaler-backed nuclear deals this year, as AI data center operators look past the overstretched power grid toward dedicated, carbon-free generation they can help finance directly.

Importantly, this is a feasibility and development agreement, not a construction commitment. AEP, which has operated a nuclear plant for more than 50 years through its subsidiary, says only a study phase has been agreed so far; no construction timeline or final investment decision date has been set. Amazon's role is to fund development work and, if the project proceeds, buy the plant's power under a long-term contract that AEP says is structured to cover the facility's costs and shield its existing ratepayers from the financial risk. Indiana Michigan Power's roughly 600 MW of additional SMR capacity planned for its separate Rockport site, explored since 2025, is a distinct effort.

AEP chairman, president and CEO Bill Fehrman said the agreements would "provide all necessary capital protections and financial safeguards" for the utility. X-energy CEO J. Clay Sell framed it as pairing "AEP's 50 years of excellence in nuclear operations with the world-class expertise of Amazon." Indiana Governor Mike Braun welcomed the project as part of the state's push to attract advanced nuclear developers — Sullivan County recently joined Indiana's Advanced Nuclear Ready Communities program. Amazon says the project could support more than 1,000 construction jobs and over 100 permanent positions if it is built.

The Xe-100 is a high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor that runs on TRISO fuel and relies on passive physics rather than active safety systems to prevent a meltdown — a smaller, modular design pitched as faster and cheaper to deploy than traditional large reactors. X-energy's first Xe-100 project, at Dow's Seadrift site in Texas, remains in the final phase of NRC permit review and hasn't broken ground; that site is also entangled in a separate Texas state lawsuit against Dow over wastewater violations, and a citizen environmental group has won standing to intervene in the NRC's review there. X-energy went public in April and its shares have fallen by roughly two-thirds since, though they rose on Monday's Indiana news.

For Amazon, the deal extends a pattern: the company already has a 20-year power purchase agreement tied to a nuclear plant upgrade in Maryland, and has committed more than $15 billion to data center campuses in northern Indiana alone. Amazon frames the investment as helping lower, not raise, local electricity bills — it points to AEP's planned $100 residential rate cut starting in 2027 and a 3.6% base rate reduction already delivered in 2026, alongside a White House pledge to cover the full cost of its own data centers' power.

Whether any of this reaches construction depends on a feasibility study with no public deadline, and on a reactor design still working through its first real-world deployment elsewhere. For now, it's a bet — by a utility, a SMR startup, and the world's largest cloud provider — that a retired Indiana coal plant becomes one of the first sites in the country's next generation of nuclear power, built explicitly to feed AI-driven electricity demand.

Source: American Electric Power press release and Amazon's official announcement, October 19, 2026.