Amazon said Wednesday it has signed three deals to develop small modular reactor (SMR) nuclear power technology, becoming the latest major tech company to seek new sources to meet growing demand for electricity from data centers .
In one of the deals, Amazon said it will fund a feasibility study for an SMR project near an Energy Northwest facility in Washington state. The reactor is expected to be developed by X-Energy. Financial details were not disclosed.
Under the agreement, Amazon will have the right to purchase electricity from four modules. Energy Northwest, a consortium of state utilities, will have the ability to add up to eight 80-megawatt modules, for a total capacity of up to 960 megawatts, or enough to power the equivalent of more than 770,000 U.S. homes.
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, CEO of Amazon Web Services.
Nuclear power, which generates electricity with virtually no greenhouse gas emissions and provides good-paying jobs, receives broad support from both sides of the U.S. political spectrum, but no SMRs yet exist in the country.
NuScale, the only North American company with an SMR design license from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, last year had to abandon the first SMR project that would have built the technology at a lab in Idaho.
Additionally, SMRs produce long-term radioactive nuclear waste for which the United States does not yet have a permanent disposal site.
Technology companies have signed a series of deals with nuclear companies this year as artificial intelligence increases energy demand, even as the timelines of nuclear projects tend to lag targets by years.
Energy consumption by U.S. data centers is expected to triple between 2023 and 2030 and require about 47 gigawatts of new generating capacity, Goldman Sachs estimates.
Source: Terra
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