Amazon inched closer to its atomic datacenter dream on Friday after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensed its small modular reactor partner X-energy to make nuclear fuel for advanced reactors at a facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
The approval clears yet another hurdle to the commercial rollout of these miniaturized reactors by major bit barn operators. Amazon became one of the first to embrace the yet unproven tech in late 2024 when it made a $500 million bet on X-Energy’s Xe-100 reactors to end its reliance on the power grid and fuel its datacenter growth.
X-Energy’s license under 10 CFR part 70 enables its subsidiary TRISO-X to manufacture the high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel pellets that will eventually power that reactor.
The company boasts its TX-1 and TX-2 fuel plants are the first such facilities to receive approval in half a century, though we’ll note they’re not exactly finished. X-Energy expects to complete construction of the first site later this year, and it can’t start churning out pellets until it passes an on-site inspection by the NRC to ensure it’s safe.
For safety’s sake, the enriched uranium is formed into small TRISO fuel particles coated in multiple layers of carbon and ceramic materials, which are then embedded in graphite to form pebbles roughly the size of a billiard ball. Hundreds of thousands of these pebbles will be circulated through the reactor continuously. In the case of the Xe-100, heat generated by this process will be captured using helium gas and then used to produce steam to drive a turbine.
Each Xe-100 reactor is expected to produce up to 80 megawatts of power continuously for 60 years. For context, that’s enough to power the typical AWS campuses of yesteryear, although the honkin’ GPU-cranking datacenters of the putative AI boom are slated to use up to 50 times that much.
X-Energy expects to produce roughly 700,000 pebbles a year at its TX-1 site, enough for around 11 reactors. Its TX-2 site, which is currently in the design phase, is expected to dramatically increase production.
While a step toward energy independence, Amazon will be waiting a while longer to get its hands on the tech. X-Energy expects to deliver the five gigawatts of power contracted by Amazon “by” 2039, with the first reactors coming online sometime in the 2030s. ®
