Amazon said on Wednesday (16) that it had signed three agreements to develop small modular reactor (SMR) nuclear power technology, becoming the latest major technology company to seek new sources of energy. meet the growing electricity demand of data processing centers.
In one of the agreements, Amazon said it will fund a feasibility study for an SMR project near an Energy Northwest facility in Washington State. The reactor is planned to be developed by X-Energy. Financial details were not disclosed.
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Under the agreement, Amazon will have the right to purchase electricity from four modules. Energy Northwest, a consortium of state utilities, will have the option to add up to eight 80-megawatt modules, resulting in a total capacity of up to 960 megawatts, or enough to power the equivalent of more than 770,000 homes in the United States.
The additional energy will be available for Amazon and utility companies to power homes and businesses.
“Our agreements will encourage the construction of new nuclear technologies that will generate energy for decades to come,” said Matt Garman, chief executive of Amazon Web Services.
Nuclear power, which generates electricity virtually free of greenhouse gas emissions and provides well-paying union jobs, receives broad support on both sides of the U.S. political spectrum, but there are still no SMRs in the country.
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NuScale, the only North American company with an SMR design license from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, last year had to abandon the first SMR project that would build the technology in a laboratory in Idaho.
Additionally, SMRs produce long-lived radioactive nuclear waste for which the U.S. does not yet have a definitive disposal site.
Technology companies have signed a series of deals with nuclear companies this year as artificial intelligence increases energy demand, although nuclear project timelines tend to delay targets by years.
Energy use by U.S. data centers is expected to triple between 2023 and 2030 and require about 47 gigawatts of new generating capacity, according to estimates from Goldman Sachs.
