Looking ahead: The AI boom is quickly creating an energy crisis. There is simply not enough electric power to sustain growth while still keeping the lights on for everybody else - not to mention the increased pollution from coal-powered plants. Amazon aims solve the problem by investing in nuclear power.
Amazon has announced that its upcoming modular nuclear plant in Washington state will generate three times as much electricity as initially proposed. The Cascade Advanced Energy Facility will provide clean power for the retail giant's Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers and generative AI clusters, whose power requirements are growing exponentially.
Amazon plans to build the power plant in a joint effort with Energy Northwest near the latter's Columbia Generating Station in Richland, Washington. Columbia is the region's only existing nuclear power plant and has a nameplate capacity of 1,216 megawatts. Amazon says the Cascade project will create more than 1,000 temporary construction jobs and over 100 permanent positions.
Cascade's construction will consist of three phases, each generating 320 megawatts of electricity from four next-generation 80-megawatt high-temperature gas-cooled reactors. Once the entire plant is operational, the 12 reactors will produce up to 960 megawatts of electricity. The project will begin "by the end of this decade," with electricity generation expected "in the 2030s."
Energy Northwest is designing the facility based on small modular reactor (SMR) technology to enable faster deployment and reduce construction costs. Its overall footprint will reportedly be equal to a few city blocks - significantly smaller than traditional nuclear reactors, which can take up more than a square mile of land to generate a similar amount of power.
Amazon also sought to address concerns raised by environmentalists, academics, and native American tribes, who accuse the company of trivializing safety and environmental concerns. According to the company, the scalable, clean, and reliable nuclear power will help reduce carbon emissions, generate jobs, and contribute to the local economy while protecting the region's ecology.
With the increasing power appetite of AI models, Amazon last year invested in an SMR development startup called X-Energy with the intention of building its own power plant to fuel its AI clusters. The company believes reactors developed by X-Energy will help add more than 5 GW of clean electricity to the US grid by 2039 - enough to power 3.8 million US homes.
Amazon and X-energy also signed an agreement in August 2025 with two South Korean power utilities - Doosan Enerbility and Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Company - to deploy more SMRs in the US. Amazon inked an additional deal with Talen Energy in Pennsylvania to build a data center next to the latter's existing nuclear plants for easy access to carbon-free energy.