AEP, X-energy and Amazon study 960 MW Xe-100 plant at Indiana coal site

American Electric Power has signed a joint development agreement with X-energy to study whether 12 Xe-100 reactors, 960 MW in all, can be built on the former site of the Breed Generating Station, a retired coal plant in Sullivan County, Indiana, AEP said on October 19, 2026. Amazon is backing development through a funding agreement, and if the plant is built, AEP says Amazon "intends to purchase the power under a long-term contract, covering the costs of the facility and its operations for the duration of the contract."

For now it is a study. AEP describes the agreement as one "to evaluate the feasibility" of the project, and its release has the plant adding power to the grid only if the development project "reaches a final investment decision and moves forward with construction and commercial operation." The initial design would use 12 units of 80 MW each, configured in groups of four. Neither AEP, X-energy nor Amazon gives a cost estimate, a construction start or an in-service date, and none of the three names a regulatory filing for the site.

The land would trade coal for reactors. X-energy calls it an AEP-owned brownfield that the project would redevelop for nuclear power; Amazon's post describes it as the site of the former coal-fueled Breed station. Sullivan County "recently became part of the Indiana Advanced Nuclear Ready Communities Program," per AEP, and X-energy credits Gov. Mike Braun and the General Assembly with a range of state policies enacted since 2025, including investment and manufacturing tax credits. Indiana already appears in our nuclear coverage as the home of the Navy microreactor planned at Crane.

Three accounts of one agreement

The three companies announced the same deal at three different strengths. AEP's is the most careful. X-energy's release says Amazon "will provide certain project development funding for the effort" and describes it as "milestone-based development capital." Amazon's newsroom post opens with "Amazon is funding a nuclear energy plant in Indiana targeting 960 megawatts of carbon-free energy," and says the three companies "will target building 12 of X-energy's Xe-100 SMRs," with output that "would serve both the regional power grid and Amazon's data centers."

Amazon casts itself as the plant's first customer, buying power once it operates, and puts the local payoff at more than 1,000 construction jobs and more than 100 permanent ones. Even the location moves a little between drafts: AEP says the companies are evaluating the former Breed site itself as a location, while X-energy puts the plant near it.

Where the accounts agree is on who pays. "Our agreements with Amazon and X-energy will provide all necessary capital protections and financial safeguards that we have said are essential for any potential nuclear project to move forward," said Bill Fehrman, AEP's chairman, president and chief executive. Josh Weissman, the Amazon vice president quoted in AEP's release, put it as "Together, we're looking to develop nearly a gigawatt of carbon-free power for the regional grid and pay our full costs without passing them to others." AEP frames the whole effort around affordability for customers of its Indiana Michigan Power utility.

Where the Xe-100 stands

The Indiana plant would be the second project in the Amazon and X-energy collaboration aimed at more than 5 GW of new US nuclear capacity by 2039, following Energy Northwest's Cascade Advanced Energy Facility in Washington state, both companies say. X-energy counts it as its third announced commercial Xe-100 project in the US and fourth worldwide, within a commercial pipeline of about 11.5 GW. Amazon led X-energy's Series C-1 round in 2024, which closed at $700 million, to finish the reactor's design and licensing and the first phase of its TRISO-X fuel plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

The first Xe-100 plant is still waiting on its construction permit. It is Long Mott Energy's four-unit plant in Calhoun County, Texas, which would supply electricity and industrial steam to a Dow site; X-energy says the NRC's review of that application is in its final phases. The NRC's project page targets a final safety evaluation in November 2026 and lists the construction permit decision as "TBD." The reactor itself is an 80 MWe high-temperature gas-cooled design that uses helium as a coolant and TRISO particle fuel (our SMR explainer covers the fuel and the licensing path; the Advanced reactors in the US: SMRs and microreactors page tracks the rest of the field).

The missing price has a public reference point, if an old one. A University of Colorado Boulder preprint, covered here in September, lists a manufacturer-advertised Xe-100 investment cost of $7.5 million per MW, taken from a 2022 document by X-Energy Reactor Company and Ares Acquisition Corporation and normalized to 2020 dollars. At that advertised rate, 960 MW would cost about $7.2 billion by our arithmetic. The same paper found that almost all the SMR concepts it modeled have discounted payback periods longer than their technical lifetimes on energy-market revenue alone, and noted, citing earlier work, that most nuclear projects become bankable for private investors only after de-risking through government involvement. The paper models reactors selling into wholesale markets, with capacity revenue and tax credits on top; the Indiana structure instead has Amazon covering the facility's costs for the life of its contract.

Outlook

If the feasibility work supports going ahead, the next public steps would be the final investment decision AEP names and, for a reactor in the US, an NRC license application: either a construction permit followed by a separate operating license, or a single combined license, the two routes our SMR explainer describes. None of the three companies has dated any of these steps. The nearer signal for the design is in Texas: an NRC decision on Long Mott's permit would be the first for any Xe-100, and the timing of that decision is the best available guide to how long a Sullivan County application might take.