00:00Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Friday, October 18.
00:05Today on Forbes, Amazon is betting big on small nuclear reactors to power its data centers.
00:13Amazon is betting big on nuclear power to help drive a massive data center expansion
00:18that includes more than $52 billion across just three U.S. states.
00:24Amazon and Dominion Energy, the $48 billion market cap energy behemoth, announced Wednesday
00:30that they've entered into an agreement to explore the development of small modular reactors,
00:35a type of advanced nuclear reactor less than 10% the size of a traditional nuclear plant
00:40in Virginia.
00:42Amazon simultaneously announced an agreement to fund the development and deployment of
00:46small modular reactors in Washington state with the public power agency Energy Northwest.
00:53Amazon signed a separate agreement with X-Energy, a developer of small modular reactors, also
00:58known as SMRs, that is building one as part of the partnership with Energy Northwest.
01:03The startup is currently building its first advanced reactor with chemical giant Dow in
01:08Seadrift, Texas.
01:10As part of its agreement with X-Energy, Amazon is anchoring a $500 million investment in
01:15the startup, which was founded by billionaire serial entrepreneur Cam Ghaffarian in 2009
01:21through its Climate Pledge Fund.
01:24Through this deal, Amazon and X-Energy plan to bring more than 5 gigawatts of new power
01:28projects online across the United States by 2039, enough to power more than one mid-sized
01:35city in an effort to meet the ballooning power needs of artificial intelligence.
01:40Amazon, as well as other major data center providers like Microsoft and Google, are looking
01:45to these small modular reactors to serve their rapidly growing power needs.
01:51SMRs can be built in less time and at lower cost than traditional nuclear power plants.
01:56Plus, they're carbon-free, key to the tech giant's broad commitments to reduce emissions.
02:02And unlike solar or wind power, they're reliable and can operate 24 hours a day, a
02:07key advantage for data centers and factories.
02:10The U.S. Department of Energy has said that U.S. nuclear capacity has the potential to
02:14triple from 100 gigawatts in 2024 to 300 gigawatts by 2050 to meet the demands of
02:21both decarbonization and nonstop power.
02:24Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon's cloud computing company Amazon Web Services, or AWS, told
02:31Forbes, quote,
02:32Nuclear is a great option for how we scale the world's energy needs.
02:36We need more energy brought to the grid.
02:38He added that SMRs are the, quote, most promising new technology to do that.
02:44Garman, who started at Amazon as a summer intern in 2005 and became AWS's third CEO
02:50in June, said that he expected nuclear to be an important piece of how the company continued
02:55to expand its data centers to meet demand, while also reaching its goal of net zero across
03:00its operations by 2040.
03:02He declined to give targets for how much of AWS's power needs would be supplied by nuclear,
03:07but said he hoped it would be a, quote, material source of power generation by 2040.
03:12Garman said, quote,
03:14We view it as a cost-effective way to scale up energy.
03:17And he added, quote,
03:19It depends how fast the technology evolves and how rapidly we can scale building new reactors.
03:25But while nuclear power does not release greenhouse gases, it requires managing radioactive waste.
03:31And despite lots of talk in recent months about the development of SMRs, none have opened
03:36in the United States to date, leaving unanswered questions about their expense and feasibility.
03:42Doug Vine, director of energy analysis at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions,
03:47said that the costs, quote,
03:49are a bit of a moving target now.
03:51Garman said that while the technology is new, it has advanced dramatically in recent years,
03:55and that new advanced nuclear reactors are far safer than the old plants of the 1950s and 60s.
04:01It's been 45 years since a nuclear reactor, Three Mile Island, near Middletown, Pennsylvania,
04:07melted down in what was the most serious accident in U.S. commercial nuclear plant
04:11operating history.
04:12Now, a different reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant is slated to reopen,
04:17in order to power Microsoft's data centers.
04:21For full coverage, check out Amy Feldman's piece on Forbes.com.
04:26This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes.
04:29Thanks for tuning in.
Comments