Amazon has unveiled significantly expanded plans and shared initial renderings for its advanced nuclear energy project in Washington State, its home headquarters.
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The planned facility, now officially named the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility, will be built near Energy Northwest’s Columbia Generating Station outside of Richland, Washington. The project, a partnership between Amazon, local utility Energy Northwest, and reactor developer X-energy, has been scaled up to triple its original proposed size.
Initially announced about a year ago, the agreement supports the deployment of X-energy’s Xe-100 high-temperature gas-cooled Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). The modular nature of the design is central to the project’s appeal, allowing it to be constructed more cost-effectively and easily than conventional nuclear plants.
At full build-out, the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility will utilize 12 SMR units (in three 320-megawatt phases), delivering a combined capacity of 960 megawatts. This output is roughly enough electricity to power the equivalent of 770,000 U.S. homes. Crucially, Amazon notes the entire facility will occupy only a few city blocks, a drastically smaller footprint compared to the square mile a traditional reactor of similar capacity might require.
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The move signals Amazon’s increasing commitment to securing reliable, carbon-free power for its rapidly expanding AWS data centres and AI workloads. The project is part of the company’s ambitious goal to deploy more than 5 gigawatts (GW) of new nuclear energy across the U.S. by 2039.
The construction phase is expected to generate over 1,000 construction jobs, with the operational facility creating over 100 permanent, family-wage positions. Given that the next-generation Xe-100 reactors are still undergoing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensing process, construction is currently slated to begin by the end of this decade, with power generation targeted to start sometime in the 2030s.
