X-Energy Reactor Company, a nuclear reactor and fuel design engineering company, announced a Series C-1 financing round of approximately $500 million, anchored by Amazon. The investment will help meet growing energy demands by funding the completion of X-energy’s reactor design and licensing as well as the first phase of its TRISO-X fuel fabrication facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Additionally, the funding will support future carbon-free projects that will use X-energy’s Xe-100 advanced small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). Citadel Founder and CEO Ken Griffin, affiliates of Ares Management Corporation (Ares), NGP, and the University of Michigan join Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund in the financing round.

Amazon and X-energy are also collaborating to bring more than 5 gigawatts of new power projects online across the United States by 2039, representing the largest commercial deployment target of SMRs to date.

The efforts will help meet growing energy demands in key locations through direct project investments and long-term power purchase agreements to help power Amazon operations. Further, X-energy and Amazon plan to establish and standardize a deployment and financing model to develop projects in partnership with infrastructure and utility partners.

The companies will initially support a four-unit 320 MW project with regional utility Energy Northwest in central Washington with the option to increase that project to 12 units and 960 MW. Amazon is immediately committing a direct investment in the Energy Northwest project to fund early development work that X-energy will perform.

Each reactor unit is engineered to provide 80 MW of electricity and is optimized in multi-unit plants ranging from 320 MW to 960 MW. The simplified modular design is road-shippable and intended to drive geographic scalability, accelerate construction timelines, and create more predictable and manageable construction costs.

X-energy’s advanced reactor technology offers remarkable efficiency and resiliency to meet the requirements of energy-intensive data centers, allowing Amazon to align its growth and carbon-free energy goals.

X-energy is developing its initial Xe-100 plant at Dow Inc.’s UCC Seadrift Operations manufacturing site on the Texas Gulf Coast. (Earlier post.) Supported by the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP), the project will be the first grid-scale advanced nuclear reactor deployed to serve an industrial site in North America, providing the site with zero-carbon emissions power and high-temperature steam.

ARDP also supports X-energy’s first-in-the-nation commercial facility to exclusively manufacture TRISO fuel, which DOE calls “the most robust nuclear fuel on Earth.”