Amazon is buying a stake in US nuclear developer X-energy, as part of a collaboration with the company aimed at deploying small modular reactors (SMRs) to provide low-carbon electricity to power its data centres.
Maryland-based X-energy said on Wednesday that Amazon had agreed to anchor a $500m (€460m) fundraising, which would help X-energy finance the development and licensing of its new generation of SMRs, which it said are more efficient than large-scale nuclear reactors.
Amazon’s investment in X-energy includes manufacturing capacity to develop the SMR equipment to support more than 5 GW of new nuclear energy projects using X-energy’s technology.