The Susquehanna Steam Electric Station sits along the west bank of the Susquehanna River in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, its two boiling-water reactors generating enough carbon-free electricity to power roughly 1.5 million homes. By mid-2026, virtually all of that output is spoken for by a single customer: Amazon.
Under a 17-year agreement with plant owner Talen Energy, Amazon has secured approximately 2 gigawatts of dedicated nuclear power for a sprawling data center campus built directly adjacent to the plant. The arrangement, which routes electricity behind the meter rather than through the regional wholesale grid, represents the largest known commitment of nuclear generation to a single private buyer in the United States. It also sits at the center of a regulatory and legal battle that will determine whether other tech giants can follow the same playbook.
How the deal came together
The partnership traces back to March 2024, when Amazon acquired the Cumulus Data campus next to Susquehanna for roughly $650 million. That initial purchase gave Amazon a 960-megawatt co-location arrangement drawing power from one of the plant’s two reactor units. Talen subsequently extended the nuclear supply commitment to cover the plant’s full generating capacity, and the companies announced plans for additional data center development on the site.
For Amazon, the logic is straightforward. Training and running large AI models demands enormous, sustained electricity loads, and nuclear reactors deliver exactly that: constant, weather-independent, carbon-free power around the clock. Locking in a dedicated supply for nearly two decades insulates Amazon from wholesale price swings and helps the company meet its climate commitments without relying on intermittent wind or solar.
For Talen, the deal provides a single, highly creditworthy buyer for Susquehanna’s output over a period long enough to justify continued investment in the plant. Nuclear operators have struggled for years with thin margins in competitive wholesale markets. A guaranteed offtake agreement with one of the world’s largest companies changes that calculus entirely.
The FERC fight
The deal’s structure is what makes it controversial. Because the data center sits behind the plant’s meter, the power never enters the PJM Interconnection wholesale market, the grid operator serving 65 million people across 13 states and the District of Columbia. That means PJM loses access to roughly 2 gigawatts of reliable baseload generation, and the costs of maintaining grid reliability get spread across fewer remaining customers.
In December 2024, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected the initial interconnection service agreement that Talen’s subsidiary, Susquehanna Nuclear, and PJM had filed under FERC docket ER24-2172. The order found that the behind-the-meter arrangement, at this scale, raised unresolved questions about grid reliability and cost-shifting.
The decision exposed a sharp split among commissioners. Commissioner Mark Christie, in a published concurrence, warned that allowing a single company to pull an entire nuclear plant off the shared grid could set a “dangerous precedent.” His core concern: if Amazon can do it, so can every other large industrial consumer, steadily eroding the shared cost base and leaving ordinary ratepayers to pick up the tab.
Chairman Willie Phillips saw it differently. In his formal dissent, Phillips argued the Commission lacked sufficient evidence that the arrangement would actually harm reliability. Blocking the deal, he wrote, risked discouraging private investment in clean energy infrastructure at the very moment electricity demand is surging.
Susquehanna Nuclear has since appealed the decision in federal court. As of June 2026, the case remains pending, leaving the legal framework for similar deals unresolved.
Amazon is not alone in chasing nuclear
The Susquehanna deal is the largest, but it is not the only nuclear-for-data-centers agreement taking shape. In September 2024, Microsoft signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Constellation Energy to restart Three Mile Island Unit 1 in Pennsylvania, a reactor that had been shut down since 2019. Google has invested in Kairos Power, a startup developing small modular reactors, with the goal of bringing new nuclear capacity online for its own data center operations. Meta has issued requests for proposals seeking nuclear power for future facilities.
Taken together, these deals signal a fundamental shift: the largest technology companies have concluded that renewables alone cannot meet the scale and reliability demands of AI-era computing. Nuclear, once considered too expensive and too slow to build, is being reframed as the only proven source of carbon-free baseload power available at gigawatt scale.
What remains unknown
Several critical details of the Amazon-Talen contract have not been made public. The price per megawatt-hour, termination clauses, and any capacity-factor guarantees Amazon may have negotiated are all absent from regulatory filings and corporate announcements. Without those terms, it is impossible to know whether Amazon is getting a below-market rate or paying a premium for guaranteed supply.
How the power will be split between AI training runs and inference workloads is also unclear. Training large language models requires enormous, sustained bursts of electricity, while inference (running a trained model to answer queries) draws power more steadily but at lower peaks. The distinction matters because a nuclear plant produces constant output. If Amazon’s load profile fluctuates significantly, the company may still need to draw from or export to the grid at certain hours, complicating the behind-the-meter arrangement.
Nuclear fuel costs and spent-fuel storage obligations add another open question. Talen holds the Nuclear Regulatory Commission license and operates the reactors, but neither company has disclosed whether Amazon bears any financial exposure to fuel-cost increases or waste-handling liabilities over the 17-year term.
No independent engineering studies have been released quantifying how the loss of Susquehanna’s output would affect PJM’s reserve margins, transmission congestion, or long-term resource planning. FERC’s orders reference reliability concerns in general terms but do not attach detailed grid modeling. That gap makes it difficult to assess how replicable the arrangement is in other regions with different generation mixes or transmission constraints.
Why the court ruling will ripple far beyond Pennsylvania
The federal appeal is not just about one nuclear plant and one data center. If the court remands the case to FERC with instructions to approve the interconnection agreement, the precedent would immediately apply across PJM’s 13-state territory and likely influence grid operators nationwide. Other tech companies would have a legal template for locking up large generators behind the meter, and utilities would face pressure to offer similar arrangements or risk losing their biggest potential customers.
If the court upholds FERC’s rejection, Amazon and Talen would need to restructure the deal, most likely routing power through the wholesale market and paying standard transmission charges. That outcome would raise costs for Amazon but preserve the shared-grid model that consumer advocates and competing generators have fought to protect.
Either way, the case has already reshaped the conversation. Competing generators, consumer groups, and state regulators have all intervened in the FERC proceeding, and PJM itself is working on new rules for how to handle large co-located loads. The question is no longer whether AI will reshape the electric grid. It is who pays for the transformation, and whether the country’s largest source of carbon-free power will serve the public grid or private data centers first.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
