Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
X-energy, a company backed by technology giant Amazon, has closed one of the largest fundraisings by a nuclear reactor developer, as investors bet atomic energy will power the artificial intelligence revolution.
The $700mn funding round was led by Jane Street, and attracted cash from new investors ARK Invest, Galvanize, Hood River Capital Management, Point 72, Reaves Asset Management and XTX Ventures.
The deal brings the total funds raised by X-energy in the past 13 months to $1.4bn, as it races to deliver three big contracts with Amazon, Dow Inc and Centrica to build a fleet of almost 150 small modular reactors in the US and UK.
“The level of commitment that we have from Dow, from Amazon and from Centrica in the UK, I think it’s really distinguished us in the marketplace,” Clay Sell, X-energy’s chief executive, told the Financial Times in an interview.
“We have an order backlog now that is north of 11 gigawatts, which is 144 [SMR] units.”
Amazon took two seats on X-energy’s board when it invested in the SMR developer last year in a deal aimed at bringing more than 5 gigawatts of SMR-generated power online by 2039, enough to supply 4mn homes.
X-energy’s fundraising is the latest by a company developing SMRs, a type of nuclear fission reactor that generates less than 300 megawatts of electricity, which is about a third of the capacity of standard reactors.
Rival SMR developer Valar Atomics raised $130mn earlier this month from investors, which included Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey and Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar.
Aalo Atomics raised $100mn in August, Bill Gates-based TerraPower raised $650mn in June and Radiant raised $165mn in May.
“This is the best fundraising environment ever for [nuclear] fission,” said Adam Stein, Director of Nuclear Energy and Innovation at the Breakthrough Institute.
“Historical deployments were built by large companies and funded by large utilities and ratepayers. The current approach is very different and will require more private investments like this.”
X-energy is developing an SMR which uses helium gas as a coolant, rather than water, which is standard in the current generation of reactors deployed across the US.
The company’s first project is to build four of its Xe-100 SMRs at Dow’s plant in Seadrift, Texas, a project that is backed by the US Department of Energy’s advanced reactor demonstration programme.
“We have a technology that is orders of magnitude safer than traditional nuclear, and nuclear is one of the safest forms of generation that has ever been deployed at scale,” said Sell.
“It’s a meltdown proof plan . . . and we have a regulator that is in a position and equipped to issue a licence to construct in an appropriate timescale.”
X-energy applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a licence to construct its reactors at Dow’s Seadrift site in March and received an 18-month timeline for review.
“We are ahead of schedule,” said Sell, adding that SMRs would become an important solution to meet skyrocketing demand for power from artificial intelligence industry.
