Despite technological and regulatory hurdles, Amazon remains convinced that small modular reactors (SMRs) are the answer to the cloud titan's power woes.
Last fall, the house of Bezos announced a $500 million investment in SMR startup X-Energy. On Thursday, the e-tailer revealed that X-Energy's Xe-100 SMR designs would eventually supply Washington State with "up to" 960 megawatts of clean energy.
"Eventually" is the key word here as construction isn't expected to start until the end of the decade and the plants won't begin operations until sometime in the 2030s.
The plan is to deploy the 80 megawatt reactors at a new facility called the Cascade Nuclear Energy Center outside Richland, Washington, in three phases, each totaling 320 megawatts of generative output. For context, xAI's 200,00