Amazon has appeared in a new trend this week. This sees big tech companies buying electricity from existing nuclear power plants.
The tech company will use 1.92 gigawatts of power from Tallen Energy’s Susquehanna Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania to bolster the AWS cloud and AI server chunks. Amazon is the latest hyperschool for direct access to large nuclear operators, following just after Microsoft and Meta.
The Amazon deal was announced on Wednesday, but it’s not completely new and instead changes existing arrangements with Talen. In the older version, Amazon built a data center next to the Susquehanna Power Plant, sucking up electricity directly from the facility without first sending it to the grid.
The transaction was killed by regulators over concerns that customers were unfairly responsible for the burden of running the grid. Today, Susquehanna provides power to the grid. This means that every kilowatt hours includes a transmission fee to support grid maintenance and development. Amazon’s behind the scenes arrangements would have avoided these fees.
This week’s revision will shift Amazon’s power purchase agreement before the meter. This means that AWS data centers are billed just like any other similar customers in a grid connection. Talen said the transmission line would be reconfigured in the spring of 2026, and the deal covers the energy purchased until 2042.
But wait, many more companies said they would consider building small modular reactors “within Talen’s Pennsylvania footprint” and expanding their generation at existing nuclear power plants.
Expansion of existing power plants is usually a simple way to add new nuclei. To generate more heat, you can include switching to a more highly concentrated fuel, fine-tune the settings to squeeze out more power, or renovating the turbine for larger uplifts.
Microsoft launched the trend last year when it announced it would reopen its reactors on 3 Mile Island, a $1.6 billion project that would work with Constellation Energy to generate 835 megawatts. Meta was equipped with a constellation earlier this month to purchase the “clean energy attribute” from Illinois’ 1.1 Gigawatt nuclear power plant.
Amazon and Talen’s pledge to build a new little modular reactor is a longer shot, but Amazon is in good company with peers. Several startups are pursuing the concept in the hopes of reducing construction costs with mass-produced parts. Amazon is investing in X-Energy, an SMR startup that plans to add 300 megawatts of nucleation capacity to the Pacific Northwest and Virginia.
The new generation of existing reactors and new SMRs is “intended to add netnew energy to the PJM grid,” Talen said, referring to the grid operators in the region. That last bit is likely a bid to unravel criticism from regulators about leaving the charge payer holding the bag.
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