Small Modular Reactor (SMR) company X-energy has announced the close of its upsized Series C-1 funding round, raising a total of $700 million.
Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund anchored the funding round, which included investments from Segra Capital Management, Jane Street, Ares Management funds, Emerson Collective, and others.
“We look forward to continuing to advance and scale our technology and realize our vision of fulfilling the growing energy needs of future generations,” said Kam Ghaffarian, founder and executive chairman of X-energy.
The proceeds from the fundraiser will support the completion of X-energy's SMR reactor design and licensing, the first phase of its TRISO-X fuel fabrication facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and projects that intend to use X-energy’s SMR.
X-energy is developing an advanced SMR called the Xe-100. Each reactor will generate 80MWe (electric) and 200MWt (thermal) and is designed to be installed in multi-unit plants with capacities ranging from 320MW to 960MW.
Xe-100 is a pebble-bed, high-temperature gas-cooled reactor. Fuel pebbles - about the size of a billiard ball - power the reactor, with each pebble containing thousands of uranium fuel particles.
X-energy is developing its initial Xe-100 SMR at the Dow Chemical Company’s UCC Seadrift Operations manufacturing site in the Texas Gulf Coast. The SMR’s development has received backing from the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. It is expected to be the first grid-scale SMR deployed to serve an industrial site in the US.
Last year, Amazon announced a partnership and direct investment with X-energy to bring more than 5GW of SMR capacity online by 2039. In addition, the partners agreed to establish and standardize a deployment and financing model to develop projects in partnership with infrastructure and utility partners.
The agreement with Amazon will see X-energy supply four SMRs to Energy Northwest, a consortium of state public utilities. The reactors are expected to generate approximately 320MW of capacity for the project's first phase, with the option to increase to 960MW total. These projects are due to come online beginning in the early 2030s.
Amazon will have the right to purchase electricity from the first project, and Energy Northwest has an option to expand the site with an additional eight modules.
Over the past 12 months, SMRs have received increasing support from the data center sector, which sees the technology as a potential low-carbon solution to its energy needs.
Last month, SMR firm Deep Fission partnered with Endeavour Energy to co-develop 2GW of nuclear energy to supply Endeavour's global portfolio of data centers, which operate under the Endeavour Edged brand.
Also, last month, SMR firm Oklo inked a MoU with Rpower to deploy a power model that combines natural gas and nuclear power for the data center sector.
Before this, it signed a non-binding master power agreement with US data center developer Switch to supply up to 12GW of power through 2044.
Finally, last year, Google signed a corporate agreement with Kairos Power to purchase 500MW of power across six to seven reactors. The first SMR is expected to be deployed in 2030.
