Amazon is bankrolling the Nuclear Reactors in Indiana project, a proposed atomic power plant that would turn a demolished coal station into one of the largest small-reactor sites in the country. The company said Monday it will fund development of the 960-megawatt facility south of Terre Haute and buy its electricity once the reactors come online.

The plan is a three-way pact. American Electric Power would own and operate the plant, reactor designer X-energy would supply the units, and Amazon would cover the early development costs and sign a long-term contract to purchase the power, according to the companies' announcement. The electricity would flow into the public grid while also serving the retail giant's power-hungry data centers.

Repurposing a retired coal site is a deliberate choice. The land, grid connections, and transmission lines already exist, which removes the need to carve new corridors through farmland and neighborhoods. Early field work and environmental surveys around the Sullivan County location began last month, according to the utility's project page.

Three times bigger than the first deal

The Nuclear Reactors in Indiana proposal is Amazon's second commercial agreement with X-energy and roughly three times the size of the first, which was announced two years ago. Amazon led a seven-hundred-million-dollar investment round in the reactor company in 2024, and the startup went public this spring. Together, the two companies say they aim to bring five gigawatts of new nuclear capacity to the American grid by 2039, as TechCrunch reported.

The Indiana facility would use the company's modular reactor design, with units added in phases rather than all at once. Each reactor produces roughly eighty megawatts, and the full build-out would approach one gigawatt of steady, carbon-free output — enough to power on the order of three-quarters of a million homes.

For AEP, the structure of the deal was the selling point. The utility said Amazon's long-term purchase contract would cover the plant's costs for its full duration, shielding existing customers from the financial risk that has sunk nuclear projects in the past. Chief executive Bill Fehrman said the agreements provide all the capital protections and financial safeguards the company has insisted are essential before backing any nuclear build.

A bet that still has to clear real hurdles

The timeline is aggressive, and it depends on X-energy proving its technology elsewhere first. The company's debut project — four reactors for a Dow chemical plant near Houston — has not broken ground, and its construction permit is still working through the final stages of federal review. The host site has also drawn a lawsuit from the state of Texas alleging repeated violations of water and waste rules.

The Indiana proposal itself is only a feasibility agreement for now. It must still reach a final investment decision, survive regulatory scrutiny, and win over a local community being asked to host atomic infrastructure where coal once burned. None of that is guaranteed, and small modular reactors have a long history of promising timelines that slipped.

Why it matters beyond one county

For readers, the story is bigger than a single site. Data centers are devouring electricity, and the artificial intelligence boom is accelerating that appetite. Tech giants are racing to lock in power that does not wreck their climate pledges, and nuclear — once politically untouchable — is suddenly fashionable again in corporate boardrooms.

Unlike many newly announced plants built solely behind a corporate fence, this one would feed the regional grid, with a tech giant as the anchor customer rather than the only one. If the model works — private money absorbing the development risk, public customers sharing the electrons — expect more coal towns to get the same pitch. The coal era built the grid these companies now want to inherit; the question is whether atomic power can actually deliver on the schedule the AI boom demands. Indiana's governor has already welcomed the proposal as a vote of confidence in the state's ability to host advanced nuclear technology, a signal that the political ground may be shifting as fast as the economics.

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