Amazon Is Funding 960 Megawatts of Reactors at a Retired Indiana Coal Site

American Electric Power and X-energy signed a joint development agreement on Oct. 19 to evaluate a 960-megawatt advanced nuclear plant on an AEP-owned brownfield site at Indiana Michigan Power's retired Breed coal station in Sullivan County, Indiana. Amazon is funding the development work and intends to buy the plant's electricity under a long-term contract covering the facility's costs and operations if it is built.

The configuration is 12 X-energy Xe-100 reactors rated at 80 megawatts each, grouped in three sets of four at 320 megawatts per block. The Xe-100 is a high-temperature gas-cooled design that uses helium as a coolant and TRISO fuel, and it can be air-cooled, water-cooled, or a hybrid of the two. AEP says the plant would operate more than 60 years. The utility is working through a $78 billion capital plan covering 2026 through 2030 across roughly 33,000 megawatts of generation, and it reports third-quarter results and a new 2027 through 2031 capital plan on Oct. 28.

Nothing goes out to bid on this yet. Construction follows a final investment decision, and AEP has not scheduled one, published a construction sequence, or named an in-service date. No small modular reactor has been built or commissioned in the United States, and Vogtle 3 and 4 remain the only utility-scale reactors completed in the past 11 years. The work that exists in Indiana right now is load, not generation: Amazon has announced or spent more than $30 billion on facilities in the state, including 2.4 gigawatts of new campuses in northern Indiana announced in November 2025.

For commercial electricians tracking where Xe-100 construction scope lands first, the document that matters is a construction permit, not a development agreement. X-energy's four-reactor project at Dow's Seadrift site in Texas is in the final stages of Nuclear Regulatory Commission review and could be approved by the end of the year. Energy Northwest's Cascade project in Washington, the first in Amazon's nuclear collaboration with X-energy, is also 12 Xe-100 units and 960 megawatts, starting with a single 320-megawatt block. AEP is not new to nuclear operations. Indiana Michigan Power runs the 2,278-megawatt Donald C. Cook plant in Michigan. Operating a fleet and building one are separate programs with separate craft demands, and the second one has not started here.

Indiana is X-energy's third announced commercial Xe-100 project in the United States, against a stated pipeline of roughly 11.5 gigawatts. Amazon and X-energy have said they are targeting more than 5 gigawatts of new U.S. nuclear capacity by 2039. AEP moved on two other generation deals in the same week: about $4 billion for a 702-megawatt Bloom Energy fuel cell plant near Cheyenne, Wyoming, under a 20-year contract with Google, announced Oct. 14, and an agreement for up to 1.6 gigawatts of Mainspring linear generators through 2034, announced Oct. 13.

Sullivan County has joined Indiana's Advanced Nuclear Ready Communities Program. The reactors are years from a permit application, and the load they would serve is already being built.