X-energy Raises $700M to Accelerate Small Modular Reactor Development for AI Data Centers

X-energy scores $700M investment to make SMR dream come true

Start-up claims to have booked orders for 144 miniaturized reactors totaling 11GW across US and UK Amazon-backed nuclear energy startup X-energy says it has booked orders for 144 small modular reactors (SMRs) which will eventually deliver over 11 gigawatts of power, assuming that they actually get built. And investors continue to support this vision. On Monday, X-energy revealed that it had gotten Jane Street and a slew of other private equity firms to deliver a $700 million Series D funding round to keep the lights on while the startup waits for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to sign off on a four-unit deployment of its Xe-100 reactors at Dow's Seadrift Operations manufacturing site in Texas. The Xe-100 is a fourth-generation high-temperature, gas-cooled reactor capable of producing 80 MW of power over its 60-year operational life. The startup claims the cash infusion will help to shore up its supply chains and attract new customers. Nuclear power, and in particular SMRs, has become a hot topic amid the AI boom as power has increasingly become a bottleneck for datacenter expansion across the US and much of Europe. You may recall that, late last year, Amazon announced a $500 million investment in X-energy to deploy roughly 5 gigawatts' worth of miniaturized nuclear reactors across the US by 2039. Among the first of these will be the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility in Washington state, which will supply "up to" 960 megawatts of clean energy when it comes online sometime in the 2030s. The other 6 gigawatts of power will supposedly be deployed in the United Kingdom as part of a collaboration with British energy and services firm Centrica. However, the reactors aren't expected to begin producing electricity until the "mid-2030s." Fuel for the reactors comes in the form of TRISO-X fuel pebbles, which use high-assay low-enriched uranium that is encased in three densely packed layers of carbon. Hundreds of thousands of these pebbles are gravity fed through the reactor in a continuous loop. These pebbles are cooled by a continuous flow of helium gas through the reactor core. Heat captured by the gas is then used to boil water to generate electricity. X-energy is one of several SMR startups that have attracted the attention of major cloud and hyperscale customers in recent years. For example, Google is betting on Kairos Power's TRISO fuel-based reactor design to eventually provide 500 megawatts' worth of carbon-free atomic power. While both reactors use the same fuel pellets, Kairos relies on molten salt for cooling as opposed to helium gas. Kairos' first SMR, the Hermes 2 demonstrator, is slated to supply 50 megawatts to the local grid, including Google datacenters in Tennessee and Alabama, when it comes online in 2030. And unlike X-energy, Kairos has actually received the NRC greenlight to begin construction of the reactors, though it'll still need additional approvals before switching them on. Alongside Google and Amazon, Oracle plans to deploy at least three SMRs to power a gigawatt-scale datacenter, though who will provide them isn't clear. Meta, meanwhile, has signed a 20-year deal to revive a nuclear power plant in Illinois while Microsoft is financing the rehab of the Three Mile Island Unit 1 reactor -- the one that didn't partially melt down -- to support its own datacenter expansion. ®

Amazon's X-energy gets backing from Jane Street as investors bet big on nuclear

X-energy, a company backed by technology giant Amazon, has closed one of the largest fundraisings by a nuclear reactor developer, as investors bet atomic energy will power the artificial intelligence revolution. The $700mn funding round was led by Jane Street, and attracted cash from new investors ARK Invest, Galvanize, Hood River Capital Management, Point 72, Reaves Asset Management and XTX Ventures. The deal brings the total funds raised by X-energy in the past 13 months to $1.4bn, as it races to deliver three big contracts with Amazon, Dow Inc and Centrica to build a fleet of almost 150 small modular reactors in the US and UK. "The level of commitment that we have from Dow, from Amazon and from Centrica in the UK, I think it's really distinguished us in the marketplace," Clay Sell, X-energy's chief executive, told the Financial Times in an interview. "We have an order backlog now that is north of 11 gigawatts, which is 144 [SMR] units." Amazon took two seats on X-energy's board when it invested in the SMR developer last year in a deal aimed at bringing more than 5 gigawatts of SMR-generated power online by 2039, enough to supply 4mn homes. X-energy's fundraising is the latest by a company developing SMRs, a type of nuclear fission reactor that generates less than 300 megawatts of electricity, which is about a third of the capacity of standard reactors. Rival SMR developer Valar Atomics raised $130mn earlier this month from investors, which included Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey and Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar. Aalo Atomics raised $100mn in August, Bill Gates-based TerraPower raised $650mn in June and Radiant raised $165mn in May. "This is the best fundraising environment ever for [nuclear] fission," said Adam Stein, Director of Nuclear Energy and Innovation at the Breakthrough Institute. "Historical deployments were built by large companies and funded by large utilities and ratepayers. The current approach is very different and will require more private investments like this." X-energy is developing an SMR which uses helium gas as a coolant, rather than water, which is standard in the current generation of reactors deployed across the US. The company's first project is to build four of its Xe-100 SMRs at Dow's plant in Seadrift, Texas, a project that is backed by the US Department of Energy's advanced reactor demonstration programme. "We have a technology that is orders of magnitude safer than traditional nuclear, and nuclear is one of the safest forms of generation that has ever been deployed at scale," said Sell. "It's a meltdown proof plan . . . and we have a regulator that is in a position and equipped to issue a licence to construct in an appropriate timescale." X-energy applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a licence to construct its reactors at Dow's Seadrift site in March and received an 18-month timeline for review. "We are ahead of schedule," said Sell, adding that SMRs would become an important solution to meet skyrocketing demand for power from artificial intelligence industry.