The Tek company Amazon has presented three projects that will take place in Virginia and Washington, among others, writes CNBC.
They now have an agreement with Dominion Energy – a utility company from Virginia – to look at the possibility of building a reactor. The agreement has a value of USD 500 million, about NOK 5.5 billion at today’s krone exchange rate.
The agreement is to develop a so-called small modular reactor. It is a type of smaller and more powerful nuclear reactor. According to the Institute of Energy Technology, they have an output of up to 300 megawatts, which is approximately one third of the capacity of a traditional nuclear power plant.
The background for the investment is that Amazon’s department working with cloud storage, Amazon Web Services, has a growing need for clean energy in the transition to using generative artificial intelligence. The move will be a step on the way to Amazon becoming emission-free.
Amazon is the latest of several large, international tech companies to invest in nuclear power. In the past, Google and Microsoft have presented similar plans. Google envisages developing a reactor with an output of up to 500 megawatts.
Microsoft has invested in a decommissioned nuclear power plant, which will be reopened. According to the agreement, the Tek giant will buy power from the nuclear power plant for 20 years, writes The Guardian.